Postcards to Voters

[One of mine.]

“Friendly, handwritten reminders from volunteers to targeted voters giving Democrats a winning edge in close, key races coast to coast”: Postcards to Voters.

Something I learned from my dozen cards: it is difficult to draw a relay box. But I like this one.

Greek tragedy and Theater of War

“No matter how many times you see it pulled off, the magic trick is always a surprise: how a text that is hundreds or thousands of years old turns out to be about the thing that’s happening to you, however modern and unprecedented you thought it was”: in The New Yorker, Elif Batuman writes about Greek tragedy and Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War.

There’s a new Theater of War event for Zoom tomorrow: The Oedipus Project UK. I’m going to have to miss this one — too, too much to do.

Related reading
All Theater of War posts

Goodbye to old Nancy

The limited run of Ernie Bushmiller Nancy strips available from GoComics appears to be no more. August 31, 2020, also known as April 21, 1955, was the last new/old strip. The reruns ended with Spike knocking out Sluggo again.

“In two minutes I’ll be flat on my back again as usual,” Sluggo says to himself. Could that be a comment on the nature of reruns themselves?

And Nancy is nowhere to be seen in this (apparently) final rerun. Could that be a comment on the disappearance of the strip itself from GoComics’s offerings?

No, and no. I doubt that anyone at GoComics was overthinking it.

A diehard Nancy fan will have to be content with Fantagraphics three volumes of Nancy, only one of which appears to be in print.

*

Don’t forget (as I did this morning) Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s How to Read “Nancy.”

*

September 7: Nancy is back.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

A letter of appeal

“Given Coles’ current COVID-19 rates, the anti-mask stance of some legislators and the lack of masks I witnessed on recent trips home, I’m compelled to appeal to residents”: Aubrey Lutz, a young Chicagoan, makes an appeal to the people of her home county, a COVID-19 hotspot, asking them to help keep her mother alive.

WCW to a young poet

William Carlos Williams:

Of your poems: You should be glad that people (the magazines) do not accept them (at your age); it is the first sign of worth — even of coming greatness (such as you imagine). Suppose they were accepted at once! what would that mean other than that they already exist in another? That would and should shock you and make you stop writing forever.

From a letter to Srinivas Rayaprol, March 29, 1950, in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1957).

Related reading
All OCA WCW posts (Pinboard) : Alice James on Emily Dickinson (Disapproval as a good thing)

[Srinivas Rayaprol, then twenty-four, went on to a distinguished life in poetry.]

“My dear Mr. Cleaver”

Uh-oh, it’s a letter from the principal. It deserves close reading. Click through and be delighted.

Thanks to Steven Hall for forwarding this letter.

AJ on ED

Alice James, in a diary entry dated January 6, 1892:

It is reassuring to hear the English pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate — they have such a capacity for missing quality; the robust evades them equally with the subtle. Her being sicklied o’er with T.W. Higginson makes one quake lest there be a latent flaw which escapes one’s vision.

Long before I kept a blog, I kept a commonplace book, writing out passages of all sorts by hand. I found these sentences quoted in a letter from Lorine Niedecker to fellow poet Louis Zukofsky, February 14, 1952. I just checked, and the quotation is accurate.

I mean no disrespect to “the English.” It’s the idea of disapproval as a mark of high quality that amuses me.

Related reading
All OCA Dickinson posts (Pinboard)

[For Thomas Wentworth Higginson, see here.]

Dr. Pepper × 20

A Dr. Pepper jingle, as interpreted by Eubie Blake, Doc Watson, Muddy Waters, Grandpa Jones, Maybelle Carter, the Swan Silvertones, Bill Monroe, the Four Freshmen, Bo Diddley, Melissa Manchester, Bobby Short, Ike and Tina Turner, the Mills Brothers, Teresa Brewer, B.B. King, Lynn Anderson, Chuck Berry, Hank Snow, Dana Valery, and Gladys Knight and the Pips.

None of this is normal

From The New York Times:

In a concentrated predawn burst, the president posted or reposted 89 messages between 5:49 a.m. and 8:05 a.m. on top of 18 the night before, many of them inflammatory comments or assertions about violent clashes in Portland, Ore., where a man wearing the hat of a far-right, pro-Trump group was shot and killed Saturday after a large group of Mr. Trump’s supporters traveled through the streets.

In the weekend blast of Twitter messages, Mr. Trump also embraced a call to imprison Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, threatened to send federal forces against demonstrators outside the White House, attacked CNN and NPR, embraced a supporter charged with murder, mocked his challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and repeatedly assailed the mayor of Portland, even posting the mayor’s office telephone number so that supporters could call demanding his resignation.

There’s much more, including this bit:

Mr. Trump likewise reposted messages asserting that the real death toll from the coronavirus is only around 9,000 — not 182,000 — because the others who died also had other health issues and most were of an advanced age.

The latest tweet, forty-odd minutes ago: “The only way you will stop the violence in the high crime Democrat run cities is through strength!”

He’s armed, dangerous, at least semi-mobile, and running out of hyphens. Vote, early, as if your life and the life of our democracy depend on it.

[I’ve omitted the links in the Times article, which go to tweets by others, not Trump*’s retweets. I just don’t want that junk here.]

Cheese barn or cheesebarn

[Zits, August 30, 2020. Click for a larger cheese barn.]

“Nails R Us.” “Carpet Emporium.” In today’s Zits, Jeremy thinks of his father Walt as “the closed captioning of road trips.”

I think of “Grandpa’s Cheesebarn” as a sign that we see when we drive to the East Coast or back. Grandpa has three locations; the original, the one whose sign we pass, is in Ashland, Ohio, the (self-proclaimed) “world headquarters of nice people.” Elaine and I have stopped there just once, when we moved from Boston to Illinois. The water in the restaurant where we had a quick meal smelled powerfully of sulfur. We asked the server if there was a problem with the water. She didn’t understand what she meant. Even if she had, there was nothing she could have done to fix the water.

But there is something I can do to fix today’s Zits. Because Grandpa spells cheesebarn as one word:


[Click for a larger cheesebarn.]

At least it’s not camel-case. Not yet anyway.