Ezra Grindle, industrialist and spiritual seeker. Also mark:
William Lindsay Greshman, Nightmare Alley (1946).
Scratch the contained waistline and the rowing machine. Still, eerily reminiscent.
Nightmare Alley is available as a New York Review Books Classic. I’m reading it again for the Four Seasons Reading Club. The novel is a great example of what I just decided to call demotic modernism. Epigraphs from The Waste Land, including one of that poem’s epigraphs!
Also from this novel
“GEEK WANTED IMMEDIATELY”
Thursday, September 3, 2020
A “publicity-inflamed dummy”
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
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)
Tuesday, September 1, 2020
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.
Monday, August 31, 2020
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.
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