Sally Foster Wallace (1938–2020)

This news appears to have gone unremarked beyond a local obituary: Sally Foster Wallace, teacher and writer, has died at the age of eighty-two. Her husband, the philosopher James Wallace, died in 2019. David Foster Wallace was their son.

Sally Foster Wallace’s Practically Painless English (1980) is a textbook noteworthy for the loopy humor of its sample sentences. Three random samples:

George is upset because his father thinks he lied about the cherry tree.

Rats! My wig has burst into flames again! Help!

The big fish kept out of trouble because he shut his mouth and stayed in school.

And from an exercise in commas:

You set fire to the pizza[,] didn’t you?

“End Our National Crisis”

“Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II”: The New York Times today has published a special Opinion section, “End Our National Crisis: The Case Against Donald Trump.”

Naked City playground

[From the Naked City episode “Saw My Baby There,” June 9, 1959. Click any image for a larger view. And to the girl in the first picture: stop looking at the camera!]

Swings, seesaws, slide — the only thing missing is the monkey bars.

That playground could be anywhere in mid-century New York. Those swings, like the sinks and toilets in prisons, are made to resist damage. A thoughtful parent might lay down a diaper or towel before seating a child on the metal surface. I speak from experience.

[Me, in a playground at 43rd Street and New Utrecht Avenue, Brooklyn, 1957.]

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

I’ll say!

Maria Magdalena Theotoky, graduate student:

Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (1981).

The Rebel Angels is the first novel of The Cornish Trilogy.

Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)

A little help?

[Teresa Burns Parkhurst, The New Yorker, October 14, 2020.]

Yesterday’s Daily Cartoon baffles me. “Let’s go back home — none of them are turning blue”: has this couple been traveling through a red state? campaigning for a Democratic candidate?

“A little help?” is what we used to say when a basketball rolled away to an adjacent court. People playing basketball probably still say it. So I’ll say it here: A little help? What’s going on in this cartoon?

*

I’ve added this caption to a New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest cartoon.

“The antithesis”

“He’s like the antithesis of public health”: Dr. Irwin Redlener of Columbia University, speaking of you-know-who on MSNBC a few minutes ago.

Tackling with chutzpah

From a New York Times review of Christophe Honoré’s stage adaptation of Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way :

Not only does it takes chutzpah to tackle Proust’s magnum opus, whose meandering style has wrong-footed many film and stage directors, but Honoré ups the ante by dispensing with the first two books.

What I first noticed: the profusion of clichés. After which I paused to take issue with “meandering style.” Merriam-Webster: “Meander implies a winding or intricate course suggestive of aimless or listless wandering.” Proust’s prose is neither aimless nor listless. It was only after copying and pasting the review sentence into this post that I noticed takes, which has stood in the review since October 8.

Also: the narrator’s family never had “a stay with the Guermantes in Paris.” They had an apartment in the Hôtel de Guermantes.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“The Problems of a President”

The Reverend Simon Darcourt has been visiting his colleague Ozias Froats, who studies not faces but faeces, human faeces.

Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (1981).

The Oxford English Dictionary confirms that at least most of these names for animal faeces are real. Watch your step.

The Rebel Angels is the first novel of The Cornish Trilogy.

Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)

[Collect: “a short prayer comprising an invocation, petition, and conclusion. Specifically, often capitalized : one preceding the eucharistic Epistle and varying with the day” (Merriam-Webster).]

Fifty PBS shows

In The New York Times, appreciations of fifty PBS shows that have made “a lasting imprint on our culture.” Reading through, I realize that I’ve watched a lot of children’s television: I’m happy to see Ghostwriter and Wishbone among the fifty. And I’m happy to see the very funny bilingual comedy ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.? And look: PBS has a page for that show, with several episodes.

Naked City Mongols

Whichever side of the law you’re on, the Mongol is the pencil of choice in the Naked City.

[Henry Casso as a numbers runner. James Franciscus, Harry Bellaver, and John McIntire as Detective Jimmy Halloran, Detective Frank Arcaro, and Lieutenant Dan Muldoon. From the Naked City episode “Ten Cent Dreams,” March 10, 1959. Click either image for a larger view.]

I missed these Mongols the first time around. Other Naked City Mongols: here, here, and here. When I was a kid, the Mongol was the pencil of choice in our family. Still my favorite pencil.

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All OCA Mongol posts and Naked City posts (Pinboard)