Pen and paper and

From Judith Flanders’s A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (New York: Basic Books, 2020):

To write in ink required a great deal of equipment, far more than today’s pen and paper: paper and a pen, to be sure, but also a knife to sharpen the pen’s nib; ink in an inkwell; sand or pounce (pumice) in a shaker to dry the ink; a cloth to wipe excess ink from the pen; wax or wafers to seal documents, a seal; and a candle or other type of fire to heat the wax. In 1663, Samuel Pepys heard news of “a Silver pen . . . to carry inke in,” which was likely an early prototype of the fountain pen, but either he never got his hands on one or it was unsatisfactory, for two years later he reported that on a hackney-coach journey, suddenly “thinking of some business, I did [a]light and . . . by the help of a candle at a [market] Stall . . . I wrote a letter . . . and never knew so great an instance of the usefulness of carrying pen and ink and wax about one.”

Also from this book
On “the preeminence of ABC” : Meaningful letters

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its sixth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. In our sixth year we read nine novels, two plays, and one short-story collection. And we spent almost five months climbing one mountain. In alphabetical order:

Robertson Davies, The Cornish Trilogy : The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, The Lyre of Orpheus

William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley

Erich Kästner, Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Julio Ramón Ribeyro, The Word of the Speechless: Selected Stories

Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross, Transit

Sophocles, Philoctetes, Women of Trachis

Gabriele Tergit, Käsebier Takes Berlin

Kurt Tucholsky, Castle Gripsholm

Thanks to the translators whose work opens up other worlds: Cyrus Brooks, Carol Clark, Peter Collier, Lydia Davis, Margot Bettauer Dembo, Sophie Duvernoy, James Grieve, Michael Hoffman, Peter Meineck, Ian Patterson, Katherine Silver, John Sturrock, Mark Treharne, and Paul Woodruff.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.

Meaningful letters

From Judith Flanders’s A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (New York: Basic Books, 2020):

A few letters have retained meanings, or vestiges of meanings, even after millennia. In Greek, for example, omicron is ò mikrón — short, or little, “o” — to make clear the distinction between that letter and omega, ō méga — long, or big, “o”; epsilon, è psilón, or naked “e,” clarifies that that letter is not the same as êta, which, owing to its accent, is not naked, but dressed. In French, the name of the letter “y” is pronounced “ee-grek,’” that is, “Greek ‘i’,” while in English “w” is pronounced “double u,” a reminder that the written letter is made up of two u’s joined together.

Also from this book
On “the preeminence of ABC”

Today’s Nancy

Today’s Nancy harks back to a 2019 strip with a cookie jar and meta hijinks. Olivia Jaimes, whoever she is, is a hugely inventive artist.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[“Olivia Jaimes” is a pseudonym.]

Fifty blog-description lines

For many years the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — served as what Blogger calls a blog description line. In May 2010, I began to vary the line, always choosing some word or words or element of punctuation from a post then on the front page, and always keeping the quotation marks that enclosed Van Dyke’s words. The result is an array of odd slogan-like bits of language.

Here are the latest fifty. Some are immediately familiar to me; others are now mysteries. “Improvisational jazz”? A farcical phrase from Jonathan Turley’s testimony in Donald Trump**’s first impeachment. “Not making cowsheds, I’ll bet”? Ya got me. See if you can spot the salty line:

“The one I thought of”
“A slightly belated Happy National #2 Pencil Day to all”
“Nowheresville my eye”
“What’s an ethos?”
“Applying for a learner’s permit tomorrow”
“I would like you to do us a favor though“
“My great and unmatched wisdom”
“At the kitchen table”
“I’m in. You?”
“I take notes”
“Patience and Fortitude”
“I keep notes”
“Improvisational jazz”
“Online header of a sort”
“And you are?”
“I was just leading a workshop on ornament making”
“Typing 2020”
“Ploks”
“If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost”
“Whale, oil, beef, hooked”
“Wait a minute, that’s me!”
“Not making cowsheds, I’ll bet”
“For practical purposes”
“Stay home if you can”
“Stay home if your life and work allow it”
“In a parallel universe”
“The day of small things”
“SITEEMO”
“One-way aisles”
“Me travel?”
“Aiieee!”
“Door stop, essentially”
“You’ve reverted to the Blogger legacy Interface”
“TRUMP = DEATH”
“Vote as if your life depends on it”
“We are waiting for Brünnhilde”
“Hurry, January”
“Georgia Blue”
“More energy, better sleep, fewer typos, less despair”
“Then, voyager”
“Weeks of inward winter”
“Research outfit”
“A single window”
“Dishes of fruit from remembered suppers”
“Somebody was here”
“Still on its display card”
“Spaghetti and coffee at midnight”
“Not one real character concealed under a false name”
“Scroll!”
“The desk fills the screen”

It does.

More blog-description lines
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more : But wait — there’s more : Another fifty : Is there no end to this folly?

Bob Koester (1932–2021)

He was the proprietor of Chicago’s Jazz Record Mart and the founder of Delmark Records, a home to blues and jazz musicians of all stripes. The New York Times has an obituary. As does the Chicago Tribune.

Out of practice

Elaine and I went out to visit friends last night, our first nighttime social effort in well over a year. And we didn’t remember to turn on the outside light when going out. We’re out of practice.

But we did remember how to talk to other people in person. Once again, it didn’t feel odd at all.

Today’s Newsday Saturday

I woke up thinking I’d better write a post about the Newsday  Saturday crossword. And then I realized that I hadn’t done the puzzle last night. Why? Because we were visiting friends to watch a movie, for the first time in well over a year. The times are changing.

Today’s puzzle is by the Newsday puzzle editor, Stan Newman. It’s a fine puzzle, with room for lowlifes and rowdies and royalty:

5-D, four letters, “Wild bunch.”

28-D, five letters, and 49-A, three letters, “Quite a boor.”

34-A, fifteen letters, “2017 QEII celebration.”

For me this was one of those puzzles in which clue after clue leads nowhere — for instance, 17-A, seven letters, “Paper aide,” or 30-D, five letters, “More than kind.” And then when the puzzle is done, nearly every answer seems inevitable.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

3-D, six letters, “Bread flavoring.” Yes.

8-D, fifteen letters, “Erie Canal Museum city.” We’ve stayed there a few times on road trips — in the city, not the museum.

20-A, seven letters, “They’re in a book of Liszt’s.” Where they’d be Liszted in the index, I suppose.

30-A, five letters, “Evacuation order.” A nice clash of diction between clue and answer.

35-D, eight letters, “Signature collectors’ banes.” Who thinks about these things? Signature collectors, I guess.

38-A, six letters, “Deny or sustain, say.” Not as obvious an answer as you might think.

44-D, six letters, “Milwaukee TV tribute statue in a two-thumbs-up pose.” Not SISKELANDEBERT.

62-A, eight letters, “Subject of an early Tom Wolfe book (1968).” Easy to be misled by the opening letters of the answer, at least if you’re me.

One pairing that doesn’t persuade me: 12-D, eight letters, “Ecclesiastical antonym.” I may be missing something, but I don’t see a contrast. Ecclesiastical matters can be just as 12-D in their focus as anything else.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“Adoration” again

[“Adoration,” by Florence Price, arranged by Elaine Fine. Randall Goosby, violin. Zhu Wang, piano.]

Here’s “Adoration” again, this time with audio and video. And this time the text under the video at YouTube credits Elaine as the arranger.

I get pitches

Only occasionally. They suggest “collaboration,” and they’re inevitably from someone with no idea what my blog is about. This morning, there’s a pitch from a website:

Hello! Great to MEAT you!

It’s all about meat and health and positive emotions. Meat: that must be why this pitch was in the SPAM folder! Maybe I should send them one of my WURST efforts! Or should it be WELL-DONE? I’ll hurry and try not to take too LOIN! Now I’m out of exclamation points.

Related reading
All OCA liverwurst posts (Pinboard)

[What is my blog about? Many things.]