“Hearing an iron rod being sawed”

Another version of the preparations for a nocturnal expedition:


Xavier de Maistre, Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. 1825. In Voyage Around My Room. Trans. from the French by Stephen Sartarelli (New York: New Directions, 1994).

The passage from “I soon noticed” to “I should certainly have produced a masterpiece” is a deletion from a manuscript. The translator explains that he has included it

because the author himself said in a letter that he had regretted that deletion and that “this jest on the baroque names of Ossian’s heroes is no worse than the rest,” and because I myself found the passage too amusing to relegate to an end note.

Also from de Maistre
“I rarely follow a straight line” “Three steps backwards”

[Whatever Blogger’s limit is for image size, I ran up against it in trying to post this passage as one image. The orator Demosthenes practiced speaking with pebbles in his mouth.]

“Three steps backwards”

New room. No servant, no dog. Xavier de Maistre prepares for a second journey:


Xavier de Maistre, A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. 1825. In A Journey Around My Room. Trans. from the French by Andrew Brown (Richmond, UK: Alma Classics, 2013).

This journey includes a theory of infinite worlds (expressed in a single sentence) and a moment of inept flirtation with a beautiful neighbor seen on a nearby balcony (“Lovely weather tonight!”). Wonderful, funny stuff.

*

Later that same morning: As I just discovered, the New Directions edition of de Maistre’s works restores to this passage some sentences that de Maistre regretted deleting. I’ll post that version soon.

*

Here it is.

A related post
A passage from A Journey Around My Room

[Pope: the poet, Alexander. Ossian: the poet-identity attached to James Macpherson’s pastiches of Gaelic poetry.]

◯

Found via Laura Olin’s newsletter: Circular. Draw a circle and see how close you get to perfect. Caution: highly addictive. Hint: the more pixels you put on the screen, the better. Go slow.

I had to check: it was Henry Dreyfuss who liked to draw perfect circles freehand. He designed the Honeywell Round Thermostat, among many other things.

Fauci, mensch

As everyone should already know, Dr. Anthony Fauci is a mensch. This tweet is just one small bit of evidence.

Word of the day: staycation

The Oxford English Dictionary word of the day is staycation, “a holiday spent at home or in one’s country of residence.” Useful for those traveling around their rooms.

The first citation is from an advertisement in The Cincinnati Enquirer, July 18, 1944:

Better tuck a few more bottles of Felsenbrau into the icebox, today . . . Take a Stay-cation instead of a Va-cation, this year. Trains and busses [sic] are crowded.

And now I’m trying to find a familiar 1940s poster: a man taking a staycation, sitting in an easy chair with fan, radio, iced tea, lemonade, dog, and pipe at hand in mouth. I think this man has taken a vacation from his staycation. No, wait — there he is:


[Albert Dorne, “Me travel? . . . not this summer.” 1945. From the University of North Texas Digital Library. Click for a larger view.]

This man was difficult to track down today — a search for stay home poster now returns images with a pandemic theme.

[I find it odd to think of staycation as meaning a holiday “in one’s country of residence,” but the OED has citations with the word used to mean just that. I wrote a description of the poster before rediscovering it and decided to let my mistakes stay in the post.]

“I rarely follow a straight line”

Xavier de Maistre, A Journey Around My Room. 1794. Trans. from the French by Andrew Brown (Richmond, UK: Alma Classics, 2013).

Sentenced to a forty-two-day house arrest for dueling, aristocrat and military officer Xavier de Maistre (1763–1852) made a grand tour of his room, with his dog, his servant, and his imagination to sustain him. A Journey Around My Room is an amusing, unpredictable travelogue, especially appropriate to this time of life indoors. A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room was to follow in 1825. If you like Laurence Sterne, who, too, refused to follow “a strait line,” you’ll like de Maistre.

The Alma Classics paperback includes both works, as does the beautifully designed New Directions volume Voyage Around My Room (trans. Stephen Sartarelli). For instant gratification, both works are available in an 1829 translation, free from Google Books.

“Bookstores”

Fran Lebowitz, in the documentary film The Booksellers (dir. D.W. Young, 2019):

“You know what they used to call independent bookstores? Bookstores.”

Word of the day: tea-fire

I thought, for no reason at all, of tea-fire, a word I remembered seeing in an L.L. Bean cookbook. It’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s in neither the second nor third edition of Webster’s New International. But it’s still right where I read it years ago:

There is something about the ritual of the noon tea-fire that gilds the lily of pleasure on a hunt. Roy [Smith, a trapper] was once genuinely outraged when I, coming in from a lone hunt, confessed that I’d had a dry lunch. “Oh, you must never do that,” said Roy. “A mon must have his hot tea at the noonin’.” He is quite right, of course (and why is it that tea it must be, not coffee?).

Angus Cameron and Judith Jones, The L.L. Bean Game and Fish Cookbook (New York: Random House, 1983).

A tip from Cameron and Jones: “Guides invariably like strong tea.” And a disclaimer from me: I have never hunted and barely fished. My acquaintance with The L.L. Bean Game and Fish Cookbook comes from a time when our household was buying all things Bean.

Google Books returns a small number of additional tea-fires, or tea fires, ranging from 1914 to 1996. The best:

We made breakfast in the willows fringing the creek in the same spot where four days previously, homeward bound, we had halted to build our little tea fire. The place was now full of recent memories.

Hamilton M. Laing, “On the Trail of the Wavies,” Outing, 64, no. 6 (1914).

So cozy! — aside from all the shooting.

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

[The 2008 Tea Fire began in an abandoned structure known as the Tea House. The wavey is the snow goose.]

What if

Goldie Blumenstyk, a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, wonders what might be happening if more college and university administrators “had made the moral case for a remote fall from the outset”:

Would higher ed be in any better shape right now in its quest for at least $47 billion in federal relief — not to mention more robust public support — if more college leaders had spent the past four months being more realistic and candid?

What if more had mentioned the unlikelihood of football this fall, of students’ being able to live safely together in residence halls, or even of holding any but the most necessary classes in person? Will it turn out that leaders’ push for a “normal-ish” fall in the midst of a deadly pandemic — whether motivated by good intentions, political pressure, existential financial fears, or some combination of all three — ultimately undermines their credibility and further damages goodwill?

Blumenstyk makes it plain: “For health and safety reasons, colleges should be predominantly online this fall. For financial reasons, some of them haven’t dared to make that call.”

Related posts
Choose your own nightmare : College, anyone? : Reluctant professors : Something is rotten in Iowa

Airing of grievances

Donald Trump* is having airing of grievances this afternoon. CNN and MSNBC have cut away, but C-SPAN2 soldiers on.

As we all know, Trump* is a teetotaler. But the affect here is that of an angry, drunken elder holding his family hostage at the dinner table.

Trump* is not Captain Queeg, who had self-awareness enough to stop himself mid-rant.