NYRB sale

New York Review Books is having a sale on all books.

Orange Crate Art is a NYRB-friendly site.

Dunning Kruger & Associates

Opacity? Come see us!

[Context here.]

Horns

A wonderful sentence.

Robertson Davies, What’s Bred in the Bone (1985).

What’s Bred in the Bone is the second novel of The Cornish Trilogy.

Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

[Reading Robertson Davies prompted us to look up some details of clerical garb.]

“You know where you can buy those?”

“In a surplice store.”

Elaine knew I’d have the punchline.

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Meltdown

A wonderful headline from The Washington Post: “Rudy Giuliani’s post-election meltdown starts to become literal.”

“Tick-tack-toe on your apple”

Frank Cornish and Art.

Robertson Davies, What’s Bred in the Bone (1985).

I’ve known of teachers like that, the kind who can never allow a student to exceed their own knowledge or ability. Miss McGladdery doesn’t even know that she doesn’t know the terms hatching and crosshatching. Hatch, from the Middle French hacher, “to chop, slice up, incise with fine lines.”

Hatching and crosshatching make me think right away of R. Crumb and Bill Griffith. See, for instance, today’s Zippy.

Griffith’s graphic memoir Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist (2015) includes this excerpt from Lawrence Lariar’s Cartooning for Everybody  (1941):

Cross-hatching is rapidly disappearing from the comic business. There is a small demand for the cross-hatch system in certain comic strips, but the more modern comic artists forgot about the cross-hatch long ago.

Not To which Crumb and Griffith say “Oh yeah?”

What’s Bred in the Bone is the second novel of The Cornish Trilogy. Academia, art, astrology, family secrets, fortune-telling, Gnosticism, hatching and cross-hatching, E.T.A. Hoffman, intelligence gathering, King Arthur, murder, opera, Romanticism, stringed-instrument repair, theology: it’s fiction with something for everyone. Totally great. And I still have several hundred pages to go.

Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard) : A review of Invisible Ink

Cal Newport on Getting Things Done

A long and not especially satisfying New Yorker piece by Cal Newport: “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” Newport says that approaches to productivity such as the one described in David Allen’s Getting Things Done

don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. They only help individuals cope with its effects.

His conclusion: we must

acknowledge the futility of trying to tame our frenzied work lives all on our own, and instead ask, collectively, whether there’s a better way to get things done.

That’s an odd conclusion, as it follows Newport’s own suggestions toward a better way — virtual task boards and daily morning meetings to “confront” those boards, so that everyone knows who’s doing what. More meetings!

Until a better way comes along, I’d say that GTD can be immensely useful to anyone contending with the insidiously haphazard demands of work — not to mention the insidiously haphazard demands of life. I speak from experience.

Related reading
All OCA GTD posts (Pinboard)

Time passes

How strange and sad, thought I, that the Go-Go’s song “We Got the Beat” is now the stuff of a television commercial for a prescription drug that treats heart disease and high triglycerides. What?

But wait a sec — that song is now more than forty years old, released in 1980 and then in a slightly longer version in 1982. So anyone who dug the song back then is now of an age to perhaps be thinking about things like heart di —

Forty years! Well, that’s enough posting for one day.

Mystery actors

[Men with hats.]

Do you recognize either actor? Both? A tweet about this image reveals the identity of the fellow on the right. But if you don’t peek, you have two mysteries to solve. I’ll drop hints if needed.

Daughter Number Three pointed me to the tweet with this movie shot. Thanks, Pat.

*

9:47 a.m.: That was fast. Both actors are now identified in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Operator speaking

From the Naked City episode “To Dream Without Sleep” (May 24, 1961). Poor Fran Burney (Lois Nettleton) has lost her last dime to a pay phone. An operator speaks:

“If your coin was not returned, please send us a postcard with your name and address, and we will forward the proper amount in United States postage stamps.”

In 1961, that would have meant sending a three-cent postcard to get ten cents in stamps. It hardly seems worth the effort. Would an audience have heard this message as a joke about an offer that few, if any, callers took up? Or did seven cents matter?

There must be eight million pay phones in the Naked City.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)