Eric Bentley’s desk

Look at the late Eric Bentley’s desk. Five photos down — you can’t miss it. See the inbox? Order!

A related post
Desk organizers

A joke in the traditional manner

What’s the worst thing about owning nine houses?

The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Did you hear about the shape-shifting car? : Did you hear about the thieving produce clerk? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : How do amoebas communicate? : How do ghosts hide their wrinkles? : How do worms get to the supermarket? : Of all the songs in the Great American Songbook, which is the favorite of pirates? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : What’s the name of the Illinois town where dentists want to live? : What was the shepherd doing in the garden? : Where do amoebas golf? : Where does Paul Drake keep his hot tips? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why is the Fonz so cool? : Why sharpen your pencil to write a Dad joke? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He gets credit for the Autobahn, the elementary school, the Golden Retriever, Bela Lugosi, Samuel Clemens, the doctor, the plumber, the senior citizen, Oliver Hardy, and the ophthalmologist. Elaine gets credit for the Illinois town. My dad was making such jokes long before anyone called them “dad jokes.” I continue in the traditional manner.]

Dad, i.m.

My dad, James Leddy, died five years ago today. He’d have been ninety-two this year.

He’s shown up in two dreams recently, sounding and looking like himself, only younger, first asking me to order a CD for him from Amazon and then walking down a brick-paved street to a hotel. That second dream cast me as both a father to my son and a son to my father. Which I am.

Here’s what I wrote after my dad died.

Fetching

A small persistent Mac problem, at least for me, over many years: right-click on a file and the Open With menu never populates. Instead it just says “Fetching. . . .” The only fix is to close out and try again.

Here’s a fix, which requires a command in the Terminal app to reset Launch Services. The fix from 2015, so proceed at your own risk. I can confirm that it still works in Mojave.

I ran into one small problem: after applying this fix, I found the MarsEdit extension in my Safari menu bar grayed out. I quit Safari, reopened, and all was well.

[I sometimes concentrate on the trivial to cope with the non-trivial.]

“The sentence of the year”

A sentence by Ed Yong, writing in The Atlantic about “How to Pandemic Defeated America”:

No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”

Roy Peter Clark: “If Yong has written the sentence of the year, and I believe he has, he can thank the semicolon.”

It is a great sentence. But reading it reminds me how rarely I now use the semicolon.

On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

[Louis Armstrong. Photograph by Carl Mydans. 1938. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

It almost got past me this year. Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

Related reading
All OCA Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

Yo!

At a signing of the Great American Outdoors Act, President Trump stumbled over the word “Yosemite” in his prepared text, pronouncing it “Yo Semites” instead https://t.co/peSgJO0D6B pic.twitter.com/nPKzgjOyFv

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 4, 2020

I recall Kelly Bundy (Christina Applegate) making a similar mistake, minus the possessive, in an episode of Married . . . with Children. I believe she said /ˈyō-zə-ˌmīt/. And yes, it was a laugh line.

Bonus: sequoias , also mispronounced.

Trump* Axios interview

Jonathan Swan’s interview with Donald Trump* for Axios on HBO is now available on YouTube.

Our well-being is in the hands of a psychopath. Read the manuals!

“Something, perhaps, like this”

Toni Morrison:

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this:

1. Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.

2. Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.

3. Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power, and because it works.

4. Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.

5. Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.

6. Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.

7. Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.

8. Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for, and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy — especially its males and absolutely its children.

9. Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press; a little pseudo-success; the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.

10. Maintain, at all costs, silence.

From “Racism and Fascism.” 1995. In The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).

Earlier Time

Aldinger was once a mayor. Now he is an escapee from a concentration camp, nearing his hometown.


Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross. 1942. Trans. from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).

Tremendously suspenseful and tremendously moral, The Seventh Cross insists on a human spirit of resistance that cannot be broken. The 1944 film adaptation focuses almost exclusively on one of seven escapees. The novel, far more expansive than the film, follows the fortunes of dozens of characters, shifting from one to another through seven days in seven long chapters. Another NYRB rediscovery, one I recommend with enthusiasm.

From Anna Segher’s Transit
“Have been and will always be” : “A substitute for home and hearth”