Chart fail

From an Axios post about “the swoon in college enrollment.” On an iPhone, the different blues are difficult to distinguish:


On the Mac desktop, the chart is easier to read, though here you’ll have to click for a larger view.


But the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has the data in a much more readable form. Here again you’ll have to click for a larger view.


Use the whole paintbox, Axios, please.

More Robert Walser

Robert Walser. Little Snow Landscape. Translated from the German by Tom Whalen. New York: New York Review Books, 2021. 188 pages. $21.95.

Yet again fresh proof of my sedulity in the practice of literature seems to have come off as quite strange.

Robert Walser

Little Snow Landscape collects sixty-nine short prose pieces written between 1905 and 1933. That’s all anyone who already knows Robert Walser’s writing in translation needs to know about this book: more Walser. He appears here, again and again, as a solitary walker, observer, and thinker, sometimes traveling extraordinary distances on foot (Bern to Geneva, Munich to Würzburg). Streets, forests, and snow-covered fields beckon. Skies and landscapes are a stylized array of lovely colors: blue, white, yellow, green. Houses have faces (windows are eyes), and snow-covered roofs are hats. They’re all better seen on foot, because

the walker can take in everything so calmly, sumptuously, and freely, while nowhere can a train traveler stand still and pause, except in the station, where mostly elegant tail-coated waiters inquire whether one would like a glass of beer. (“Walking”)

I love that sniffy “mostly elegant.”

Perhaps even better than traveling on foot is traveling by map, as Walser does in “Illusion,” in which a trip to Moscow includes a visit to a house of pleasure where a woman commands him to pour her a glass of wine. He does, she calls him a nice man, but then — everything vanishes.

Loss is ever-present in Walser’s depiction of human relations. The only love is courtly: self-abased lovers, imperious beloveds, hopeless efforts, rank disdain. Walser’s account of his pursuit of one Louise goes off in different directions, sentence by sentence, before recounting Louise’s exploitation at the hands of a powerful businessman. Or things might go the other way round: “I love you and invite you to dominate me,” a movie man anticipates saying to “a female bit player.”

The most enduring relationships in Walser’s prose are with the things of the world, the more insignificant the better:

Things near seemed to him more significant than significant and important distant things. Thus to him insignificance was significance. (“Walking”)

In “Chamber Piece” a writer at a loss for a subject looks under his bed, and finds nothing. But then he notices an umbrella hanging on the wall: “The thing was quite near.” And so it becomes his subject.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

[Cover: Karl Walser, View from the Window, 1899.]

Father’s Day

[My dad, not yet a dad, in Florida, 1954. Photo by my mom, not yet a mom. See also this photograph.]

Happy Father’s Day to all.

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword is once again by “Anna Stiga,” Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. The pseudonym signifies an easier puzzle. It’s a good one, though a few clues feel dated:

39-A, fourteen letters, “Christener of the ‘USS Missouri.’”

52-A, nine letters, “Big name in the TV business.”

63-A, seven letters, “Groucho hawked them on You Bet Your Life.”

Me, I’ve only seen You Bet Your Life with the original commercials removed.

A more contemporary motif appears in 3-D, four letters, and 47-D, five letters, both clued “Shania Twain, e.g.” My guess is that having the same clue twice is a play on twain. I hope so.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-A, seven letters, “Folks.” I did not see the answer until I did. The vowels make it tricky.

7-D, seven letters, “Willow-tree derivative.” I don’t know how I know the answer, but I do.

18-A, seven letters, “Where Falstaff premiered.” I don’t know opera, but I know Duke Ellington, and his work gave me the answer.

42-D, seven letters, “Literally, ‘harbor wave.’” I learned something.

60-A, seven letters, “Not analytical.” Philosophy!

My favorite clue in this puzzle: 13-D, ten letters, “Post stuff.” Are we speaking of the mail? Social media? Clever.

Free bonus: a clip of Lord Buckley on You Bet Your Life. Dig.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

On Juneteenth

Eugene Robinson, writing in The Washington Post:

Making Juneteenth, the anniversary of the day news of emancipation finally reached enslaved people in Galveston, Tex., a national holiday is a victory. But it is a hollow one at a moment when the political party that won the Civil War and made that freedom a permanent reality is now moving heaven and earth to keep African Americans from voting. . . .

If Republicans want to convince us they are sincere in their stirring words about the importance of Juneteenth, let’s see them sign on to the voting-rights legislation that passed the House and now is being considered in the Senate. If they don’t like that bill, let’s see them come up with one of their own to protect the right of every American to vote.

A related post
A passage from Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth

No mask

I switched back to my older (and younger) sidebar picture this afternoon. I still wear a mask when I’m in indoors with many people, some of whom will certainly be unvaccinated. But no mask outdoors. And I write my blog posts at home, unmasked. So that autumnal photograph of me standing on the sidewalk, wearing a mask, is gone, and for better or worse, my face is back. Hello.

Mac keyboard shortcuts

From David Sparks: twenty-five Mac keyboard shortcuts for greater productivity.

One strange thing about using a Mac: you can go for years before stumbling onto basic stuff. Like, say, Option-Command-L, which opens the Downloads folder from the Desktop or Finder.

Area man patents punctuation mark

It’s the Rhetoricon™, for use “at the end of a sentence, phrase, statement or comment that is both rhetorical and sarcastic.” I’m sure it’ll be very popular.

I’d add a Rhetoricon™ to the end of that last sentence if I knew how.

Pocket notebook sighting

In I See a Dark Stranger (dir. Frank Launder, 1946), Bridie Quilty (Deborah Kerr) pages through a mysterious notebook. You’ll have to watch to understand what it’s about. The movie is streaming at the Criterion Channel.

[Click either image for a larger view.]

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

[Byrrh is an apéritif.]

“Sardine Song”

“Oh for the life of a sardine, that is the life for me.” From Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight (1952), it’s “Sardine Song,” words and music by Chaplin.

Limelight is now available on-demand from TCM. If you’ve never seen it, don’t miss it.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)