“It clarifies the palate”

It’s 3:45 a.m. The scene is a beach club. Lew Archer, private detective, had some business here with the club’s owner, who’s passed out drunk in his office. What to do? There’s a light in the lifeguard’s room. The lifeguard is Joseph Tobias, twenty-five, Black, a Korean War vet and, now, an English major working his way through school. He’s been studying, reading Elements of Sociology as a party winds down, and now he’s offered to make Archer a cup of coffee. Archer is dead tired. Tobias says that the only time he ever felt tired was in Korea. Archer narrates:



And later:


Ross Macdonald, The Barbarous Coast (1956).

“It clarifies the palate”: I can’t tell you a thing about the plot of The Barbarous Coast, but that line has stuck in my head since I read the novel in the late 1970s.

Purple prose

From TYWKIWDBI, a college exam, in beautiful ditto purple. Readers of a certain age will immediately flash back to classroom “handouts,” still warm and slightly damp in the early morning, an exotic aroma rising from the paper.

I have any number of purple syllabi and handouts in my notebooks from college, usually typed, sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed with handwritten corrections added. (It was a different time.) In my earliest teaching days, I got to run a spirit duplicator and make purple pages all by myself. Later, still as a grad student, I had a free pass to use a department Xerox machine to copy articles and chunks of books. (Why not?) As a professor, I found such stuff off limits: the department machines were for staff and student workers only.

I have spent too much time this morning trying to figure out how a page printed with a dot-matrix printer (an Apple ImageWriter II) turned into the purple handout in this post. Did I run a ditto master through the printer? How could it have made an impression? And if that’s not what I did, what did “they” — the people with access to the machines — do to create a purple page?

Thanks to Ian Bagger for pointing me to the exam and an excellent (new to me) blog.

A related post
A 1940 advertisement for the A.B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator

NKDC

Elaine and I just made the mistake of turning on the television. And there she was. Within seconds, we said “North Korea.”

Not DKNY. NKDC.

*

Screenshot, the next morning:


[Click for a larger, still more autocratic view.]

Something I guess I wrote

Ron Padgett has a small book titled Poems I Guess I Wrote (2001), with poems that he does not remember writing. I just found these lines, which I guess I wrote, in a text file of odds and ends:



When? Why? I have no idea. Just fun with words.

[The sources: Ludwig Wittgestein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 7: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” And William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”: “unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress.”]

Source?

I found these sentences scrawled on a page in an old pocket notebook:

I’m not afraid of death. It just don’t suit me to be lookin’ at it.

I’m sure I was writing down something I had read or heard. (The scrawl makes me think heard.) But what? The Internets tell me nothing. Can anyone identify the source?

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, August 24, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

Hi and Lois appears to be manufactured with no awareness of current events. White privilege: Lois, you’re soaking in it.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

The Maltese mailbox

[Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and a mailbox. Union Bus Station, San Francisco. The Maltese Falcon (dir. John Huston, 1941. Click for a larger view.]

Spade has to borrow a pencil from the clerk to address the envelope. What kind of detective doesn’t carry a writing instrument? One as confident as Sam Spade. He knows that he can always borrow a pen or pencil from a friendly clerk. And he knows that when he needs to keep a claim check safe, he can trust the United States Postal Service.

Diane Schirf has written about lobby boxes and mail chutes. No chute here, but it’s an impressive mailbox.

SOUSPS.

Related reading
All OCA mail posts (Pinboard)

[I like the idea of a city in which you can address mail to “City.”]

Sociopathy unmasked

Research has shown:

People who are unconcerned with adhering to measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 tend to display higher levels of traits associated with antisocial personality disorder, also known as sociopathy.

I believe it.

I asked the person giving out masks outside our local multinational retail corporation if people were generally cooperative. Yes, she said, but some people take a mask and throw it in the wastebasket at the store entrance. Or they ask if they can wear the mask as a hat.

The height of asshattery, though falling short perhaps of sociopathy: the mask around the chin. That’s the mark of a true lover of personal liberty, eh?

The height of delusion: the no-mask-at-all people with religious sloganeering on their vestments: Let Your Faith Be Bigger Than Your Fear. (As seen yesterday.) I know from reliable sources about local people who say “It’s in God’s hands.” Okay. But deities are busy. Why not help out yours by wearing a fucking mask?

The good news is that no-masks are more and more obvious outliers. I’m pretty sure that another customer and I managed to shame a no-mask into leaving a line last week. (No details here.) I stepped away, saying “I want to keep my distance,” and a second masked customer wouldn’t even step forward. No-mask ended up walking out.

My little corner of Illinois is a coronavirus hotspot, thanks to freedom-loving asshats of all shapes and sizes. They have a sociopath as their sage and leader — or at least many of them do. My anger, I believe, is just.

A related post
Chris Miller, ugh

[“Freedom-loving”: as used here, freedom means “freedom from responsibility.”]

Person, woman, man, books, TV

Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump*’s older sister, was secretly recorded by her niece Mary Trump:

Maryanne said on another occasion that her brother kept asking about Fox News. One day, Barry said, the president called her and said, “Did you watch Fox News?”

“No,” Barry said she told the president.

“Why not?” he said.

“I don’t watch much television at all,” Barry said she responded.

“What do you do?” the president asked.

“I read,” Barry replied.

“What do you read?” the president said.

“Books,” Barry said.

The president was incredulous. “You don’t watch Fox?”

Saturday’s Stumper today

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Stan Newman, the puzzle editor, was divine, simply divine, a “Saturn-day Stumper” with clues about the Roman deity and his fambly.

Some clue-and-answer combo plates I especially liked:

1-A, four letters, “Red ___.” Do they still exist?

31-D, four letters, “Skyscraper supplier.” I like the sound of the clue.

41-A, seven letters, “Inapt outdoor sculptures.” Yes, sometimes they do need removed. (Need + past participle: a regionalism I like.)

57-D, three letters, “Heady real estate investment.” This kinda clue, I swear. (Trails off into muttering.)

59-A, six letters, “Open to the public.” I like the misdirection.

63-A, three letters, “Beer barrel pokers of a century ago.” Groan.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.