Gardol

[“They Must Obey the Cathode Ray.” Zippy, March 4, 2020.]

It’s 1953 in today’s Zippy, and television has arrived. “Gardol” made me think, Oh, dress shields. But no. I turned to Life for help:


[Life, August 8, 1955. Click for a larger floating head, scarier teeth, and more readable text.]

It’s clear to me that Bill Griffith spends time with the print materials of the dowdy world — see, for instance, this Zippy panel — but I suspect that Gardol, like Brylcreem, is something stuck in his head.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

“By the Book” for the rest of us Now with a link to questions and answers from blogger J.D. Lowe.

Coronavirus advice

Advice from James Robb, pathologist, shared on his Facebook page. I found Dr. Robb’s advice at Gothamist (New York Public Radio), with a note from NYPR in italics. Surely there must be someone out there who hasn’t yet seen these tips:

NO HANDSHAKING! Use a fist bump, slight bow, elbow bump, etc.

Use ONLY your knuckle to touch light switches, elevator buttons, etc. Lift the gasoline dispenser with a paper towel or use a disposable glove.

Open doors with your closed fist or hip — do not grasp the handle with your hand, unless there is no other way to open the door. Especially important on bathroom and post office/commercial doors.

Use disinfectant wipes at the stores when they are available, including wiping the handle and child seat in grocery carts.

Wash your hands with soap for 10–20 seconds and/or use a greater than 60% alcohol-based hand sanitizer whenever you return home from ANY activity that involves locations where other people have been.

Keep a bottle of sanitizer available at each of your home’s entrances. AND in your car for use after getting gas or touching other contaminated objects when you can’t immediately wash your hands.

If possible, cough or sneeze into a disposable tissue and discard. Use your elbow only if you have to. The clothing on your elbow will contain an infectious virus that can be passed on for up to a week or more!

Dr. Robb recommends stocking up on several items:

Latex or nitrile latex disposable gloves for use when going shopping, using the gasoline pump, and all other outside activity when you come in contact with contaminated areas. Note: This virus is spread in large droplets by coughing and sneezing. This means that the air will not infect you! BUT all the surfaces where these droplets land is infectious for about a week on average — everything that is associated with infected people will be contaminated and potentially infectious. The virus is on surfaces and you will not be infected unless your unprotected face is directly coughed or sneezed upon. This virus only has cell receptors for lung cells (it only infects your lungs). The only way for the virus to infect you is through your nose or mouth via your hands or an infected cough or sneeze onto or into your nose or mouth. [Note: There are some contradicting statements here, but common sense would suggest you want to wash your hands because of potentially contaminated surfaces, and distance yourself from anyone who appears sick.]

Stock up now with disposable surgical masks and use them to prevent you from touching your nose and/or mouth (We touch our nose/mouth 90X/day without knowing it!). This is the only way this virus can infect you — it is lung-specific. The mask will not prevent the virus in a direct sneeze from getting into your nose or mouth — it is only to keep you from touching your nose or mouth.

Stock up now with hand sanitizers. The hand sanitizers must be alcohol-based and greater than 60% alcohol to be effective.

Stock up now with zinc lozenges. These lozenges have been proven to be effective in blocking coronavirus (and most other viruses) from multiplying in your throat and nasopharynx. Use as directed several times each day when you begin to feel ANY “cold-like” symptoms beginning. It is best to lie down and let the lozenge dissolve in the back of your throat and nasopharynx. Cold-Eeze lozenges is one brand available, but there are other brands available.

Dr. Robb made clear to Snopes that zinc lozenges guarantee nothing:

In my experience as a virologist and pathologist, zinc will inhibit the replication of many viruses, including coronaviruses. I expect COVID-19 [the disease caused by the novel coronavirus] will be inhibited similarly, but I have no direct experimental support for this claim. I must add, however, that using zinc lozenges as directed by the manufacturer is no guarantee against being infected by the virus, even if it inhibits the viral replication in the nasopharynx.

“By the Book” for the rest of us

I’m beginning to suspect that the “By the Book” people at The New York Times are never going to call. Perhaps it’s because of my snarky posts about Michiko Kakutani’s too-frequent use of the word messy. Sigh. So I’m making my own “By the Book” column, or post, with questions pulled from a couple of Times columns. Why should such questions be the province of the well-known alone?

What books are on your nightstand?

As Gertrude Stein might have said, There ain’t any nightstand, there ain’t going to be any nightstand, there never has been any nightstand, that’s the nightstand.

But I have many books yet to read on shelves or in piles. A few: James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain; Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country; Gabriele Tergit, Käsebier Takes Berlin.

What’s the last great book you read?

Robertson Davies, Fifth Business, the first novel of The Deptford Trilogy. Elaine has been praising these novels for years. Now we’re reading them together, and I second her emotion. I’d say that if you like Steven Millhauser’s fiction, you’ll love Robertson Davies.

Describe your ideal reading experience.

A printed book. A chair or sofa that’s comfortable enough but not too comfortable. (Zzz.) A cup of coffee or tea nearby. A pencil. Post-it Notes. My iPhone for looking up words on the fly.

What’s your favorite little-known book?

Many of my favorite books are little known. I’ll pick one: Ted Berrigan’s A Certain Slant of Sunlight, late poems written on postcards, published posthumously. Berrigan’s use of the postcard has a lot to do with the way I’ve come to think of the blog post: a small but extremely flexible space.

Another: Works and Days, an several-hundred-page issue of the Quarterly Review of Literature devoted to the poet David Schubert: all his poems, published and unpublished, and a running commentary on his life and work by those who knew him.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

I think highly of Roger Angell, Rae Armantrout, Clark Coolidge, Bryan Garner, Steven Millhauser, and Alice Munro, among others. But most of my reading is of the dead, and really, any writer whose work is being read is working today. John Ashbery and Toni Morrison are working today.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

The story of the Bollandists, an association founded by Jesuits and devoted to hagiography. The work of the group is part of Fifth Business.

How do you organize your books?

Not as well as I once did. There’s one bookcase of ancients. Another with works running from Gilgamesh to Thomas Hardy. Two more with modern poetry. Another with modern fiction. Another with art and music. Two more with non-fiction prose and reference works. Two more with books recently read and books on tap. As my reading interests have expanded, it’s not as easy to find things as it used to be.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

I have almost two dozen books by or about Thomas Merton. What can I say? I am a devout non-believer and Thomas Merton fan. I admire his humanity, his humor, and his ability to change his thinking: having found the answer, he discovered that there were others. Reading Merton’s journals has taught me a lot about my own world of work. An academic department, with people (mostly) in for the long haul, is in some ways much like a monastic community. Better hope you can get along with your abbot (chair).

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I read mostly comic books, How and Why books, and the World Book Encyclopedia. The book that made a reader and re-reader of fiction: Clifford Hicks’s Alvin’s Secret Code, which I borrowed again and again from the public library. I still re-read it once a year (now as an ex-library copy of my own). The only “classic” I can recall reading in childhood is Treasure Island, in sixth grade, for school.

[March 13: A “classic” I forgot: Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I also bought A Tale of Two Cities, but I don’t think I ever read it. I bought these books in a department store, 45¢ each.]

How have your reading tastes changed over time?

My formal eduction was almost entirely about Anglo-American lit. Now I read more and more in translation from French and German and Spanish. I am back to my high-school self in a way, when I was reading Borges and Kafka. And I’ve become much more generous toward the nineteenth century. Not everything needs to be modernist.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

I’m sorry, but I really have no reason to think that anyone I might invite would show up. I’d rather spend an evening with true friends. But I’d give anything to speak, through an interpreter, with Homer and Sappho, whoever they were.

What do you plan to read next?

The Manticore and World of Wonders, the next two novels of The Deptford Trilogy.

An invitation in the spirit of the open Internet: Reader, why not post your own responses to such questions? Add some, omit some, make up your own. If you write such a post, let me know, and I will link to it here.

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March 4: At 30 Squares of Ontario, J.D. Lowe offers what he calls a tongue-in-cheek “By the Book”: “By the Book” — Miniature Buildings Edition.

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March 11: At Traingeek, Steve Boyko offers “By the Book” — Railfan Edition.

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May 4: Pete Anderson offers his responses to The Guardian ’s “Books that made me” prompts. And, inspired by Pete’s effort, Elaine Fine offers her responses to those prompts. (I think I prefer those prompts to the NYT questions.)

Jeez

“His business card is seven inches long”: Brian Williams, introducing a guest on The Eleventh Hour just now.

Bob Drylie, reader of Proust

Bob Drylie was a home-repair contractor, reader, writer, and artist. From a beautiful appreciation by one of his customers:

“Whatcha readin’?” he called, descending the ladder. I told him of my New Year’s resolution to read all seven novels of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. This was the second.

“When you read them all, you will join me in a select group,” he said, grinning broadly.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Canteen Canteen Canteen

[He Ran All the Way (dir. John Berry, 1951). Click for a larger view.]

On their way to the scene of their crime, Norman Lloyd and John Garfield walk right past Canteen Canteen Canteen. Gentlemen, you would have been better off stopping for a snack and exiting the garage. But then, no movie.


[Click for a still larger view.]

The snacks on hand: “Delicious Fresh Nuts,” 1¢; candy, 5¢; gum, price unknown. A Hershey bar stands in the center candy slot; Wrigley’s Spearmint is on the right in the gum offerings.

The same vending-machine triptych can be seen in They Live by Night (1948). I doubt it’s this very set of machines: there, the shiny letters above the mirror are gone, and the stickers on the middle machine differ. And besides, the machines in He Ran All the Way appear to be working in a genuine garage.

Merriam-Webster has a puzzling etymology for canteen :

French cantine bottle case, sutler’s shop, from Italian cantina wine cellar, probably from canto corner, from Latin canthus iron tire.

The Online Etymology Dictionary traces more or less the same history but adds a helpful gloss on the word:

Thus is perhaps another descendant of the many meanings that were attached to Latin canto “corner;” in this case, perhaps “corner for storage.”

If a canteen is, as M-W says, “a small cafeteria or snack bar,” this canteen is a pretty poor one. But wait: Canteen, capitalized, is also the name of a vending-machine company, still vending today. You can see the name on a sticker on the center machine. Here’s a timeline that accounts for the company name and answers a burning question: why do vending machines have mirrors?

As an example of the art of the vending machine, Canteen Canteen Canteen is undeniably impressive.

Related posts
The gum machines of Henry (Many with a mirror)
Mid-century cigarette machine

Chris Matthews and women

In the aftermath of Chris Matthews’s absurd interview of Elizabeth Warren, Laura Bassett, journalist, writes about her encounter with Matthews: “Like Warren, I Had My Own Sexist Run-In with Chris Matthews” (GQ ).

What I didn’t know: Matthews has a well-documented history of speaking to and about women in demeaning, sexist ways. Says Bassett, “The number of on-air incidents is long, exhausting, and creepy.” The link in that quotation is Bassett’s, and it goes to a 2018 Twitter thread with many examples. There’s also an off-the-air remark caught on tape: “Where’s that Bill Cosby pill I brought with me?”

Why is this guy still working at MSNBC?

Says Elaine, “We need Murphy Brown to whip the shit out of these people.”

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2:16 p.m.: Matthews was missing from yesterday’s MSNBC coverage of the South Carolina primary. Hmm.

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March 2: As readers just let me know in the comments, tonight was Chris Matthews’s last appearance on MSNBC’s Hardball. His farewell makes clear that his remarks to and about women play a role (the leading role, no doubt) in his departure.

The blind king

If the mask fits, &c.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff, is. Is less rough, that is. Gimmes abound: 8-D, four letters, “Whom Sam calls ‘Miss’”; 44-A, three letters, “Name associated with fins”; 48-A, four letters, “‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ depiction.”

My favorite clue-and-answer pairs:

7-D, five letters, “Backs up when one shouldn’t.” A clever way to clue a familiar crossword answer.

27-A, five letters, “No time at all.” You don’t often hear the answer in conversation these days.

30-A, three letters, “It’s just above 4.” Excellent!

38-A, fourteen letters, “Second album with ‘All My Loving.’” Why? Just because. But “Because” is on a later album.

And a clue whose answer I could not understand, until I just did: 24-D, seven letters, “She’s repurposed heaters.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.