Domestic comedy

“Did you do the dishes last night?”

“Yes, you identified me as doing them, as such.”

Elaine and I have been working the empty phrases “as such” and “at that” into our conversation. Living where we do, we have long been accustomed to making our own fun.

How, earlier in the day, had I identified Elaine as the dishdoer? By the spatula in the dishdrainer. Elaine puts those larger tools in the cutlery cups. I stand them up in the small rectangles formed by the coated wires running the length and width of the drainer. When I asked about the dishes, the spatula was gone.

As I said, “our own fun.” And good fun at that.

I have written this post in the excellent writing app iA Writer. When I turned on the Style Check (for fun), the app suggested removing “as such” from these sentences. No way.

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The one that got away

I forgot to include in an earlier post this clue from today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword: 14-D, four letters, “‘___ by night, a chest of drawers by day’: Goldsmith.” I will give away the answer, from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Deserted Village,” in lines that describe a now-gone inn or tavern, a “house where nut-brown draughts inspired”:

The chest contrived a double debt to pay,
A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day.

Those lines seemed familiar, and not because I have Oliver Goldsmith on my mind. I thought of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the enervated coupling of the typist and clerk:

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

There’s no note for these lines in Eliot’s often-parodic “Notes on The Waste Land,” but there is a note for lines that soon follow:

When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

Eliot’s note: “V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield.” Here’s the song.

Was Eliot consciously borrowing from Goldsmith with the divan/bed thirty lines earlier? Unconsciously borrowing? I think it must have been one or the other.

The coupling of the clerk and typist seems to have extraordinary resonance in contemporary college classrooms, at least in my experience of teaching The Waste Land. It’s an emotional blank, presented in fourteen lines that — guess what? — turn out to be a Shakespearean sonnet.

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword, by Brad Wilber, solves like an easier Stumper. Lots of interest in the clues and answers, with generous helpings of novelty and misdirection.

1-A, nine letters, “Off-the-grid period.” I, not even sports-minded, thought football.

12-D, ten letters, “Swag supporter.” Nice and arcane, at least to my ear.

19-A, five letters, “Female name that sounds like Roman numerals.” Not DEEDEE — too long. Not DIDI — too short. Not EM — you can’t have a two-letter answer in a crossword.

27-A, seven letters, “Parisian’s patron.” My first thought: What’s the French for customer?

29-D, ten letters, “Do-it-all’s bane.” Yep.

37-A, three letters, “Navigation aid.” Duh, right? Wrong. This clue adds value to 62-D, three letters, “What a 37 Across can’t do without.”

45-A, seven letters, “Peanut butter Hershey bars.” Semi-obscure candy treats seem to sneak into Newsday Saturday puzzles. Not long ago it was a MARSBAR.

64-A, nine letters, “They’re in a star’s orbit.” Wait, stars orbit?

My favorite clue-and-answer in this puzzle: 13-D, ten letters, “Seller of banded and boxed merchandise.”

And one clue I’d like to make Stumper-y: 28-D, “What a daredevil might kiss when done.” That seems too explicatory to me. How about “Dry spot”? “Everybody’s turf”? “Place to take a stand”? I’m omitting the letter count to not give away an answer. Never no spoilers.

All answers are in the comments.

*

I forgot one clue-and-answer and ending up writing another post: The one that got away.

Beverly Cleary (1916–2021)

The writer Beverly Cleary has died at the age of 104. The New York Times has an ample feature on her life and work, beginning here. HarperCollins has a Cleary website.

I’m a latecomer to the Cleary world. In adulthood, I’ve read all the Ramona books, Ellen Tebbits (my daughter’s favorite), Fifteen, Jean and Johnny, The Luckiest Girl, Sister of the Bride, and Cleary’s two memoirs, A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet. Her writing has lifted me to laughter and reduced me to tears.

Fellow kids-at-heart, I encourage you to read Beverly Cleary if you haven’t.

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False prophesying in the Times

From The New York Times:

The marked focus on vaccines is particularly striking on discussion channels populated by followers of QAnon, who had falsely prophesied that Donald J. Trump would continue as president while his political opponents were marched off to jail.

“Prophesied” seems very odd in the newspaper of record. “Falsely prophesied” seems odder still. “Believed” or “claimed” would be a more appropriate choice.

Don Heffington (1950–2021)

Drummer and songwriter, and Van Dyke Parks collaborator. Variety has an extensive obituary.

I heard Don play with Van Dyke in Chicago and St. Louis. So I can agree with Don’s Lone Justice bandmate Marvin Etzioni, quoted in Variety: “Like Ringo, he didn’t play drums, he played songs.”

The Los Angeles Times obituary has a great photo of DH and VDP. And here is Don Heffington’s website.

Write this down

Once again, research has shown:

A study of Japanese university students and recent graduates has revealed that writing on physical paper can lead to more brain activity when remembering the information an hour later. Researchers say that the unique, complex, spatial and tactile information associated with writing by hand on physical paper is likely what leads to improved memory.

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Vaccination

It makes me happy whenever I hear that someone I know has received a COVID-19 vaccine. Yay, says I, every time.

Today Elaine and I got our first shots of the Moderna vaccine. Yay, says I.

And it makes me happy to see so many people getting vaccinated. Sometimes 800 a day, the nurse said. And that’s in deep-red downstate Illinois. Yay, says I.

“In the lighted bookshop windows”

After the death of the writer Bergotte, a simple, solemn memorial.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003).

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“A little patch of yellow wall”

In Proust’s The Prisoner, the writer Bergotte dies after after gazing at “a little patch of yellow wall“ in Vermeer’s View of Delft. Marcel, our narrator, says that a critic described this patch as “so well painted that it was, if one looked at it in isolation, like a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty.” Vermeer’s painting is on loan in Paris. Bergotte, ill, hasn’t left his house in years. But he doesn’t remember this patch of wall, and he wants to see it.

Is there such patch in Vermeer’s painting? Elaine found a good discussion of that question by Dean Kissick: “The Downward Spiral: Little Patch of Yellow Wall” (Spike ). And another: “Petit pan de mur jaune” (Essential Vermeer).

My 2¢: I think it’s the bright roof in the right third of the painting. But I think the point is to invite the reader to look as closely as Bergotte looked. Bergotte’s response makes me think of the last sentence of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “You must change your life.” But Bergotte has no future:

“That is how I should have written, he said to himself. My last books are too dry, I should have applied several layers of colour, made my sentences precious in themselves, like that little patch of yellow wall.”

Moments later, he dies.

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[Quotations from The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003). The translator follows Proust in keeping the dialogue tag inside quotation marks. By this point in In Search of Lost Time, it’s more or less clear that the narrator’s name is Marcel. The confirmation is still to come. The sentence from Rilke: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern.”]