“Completely papered over”

Vienna, “some years ago.” We enter the apartment of a man known to his neighbors as the pension man. Here he lives with his wife and daughter. We enter his room.

Adalbert Stifter, “Tourmaline,” in Motley Stones, trans. Isabel Fargo Cole (New York: New York Review Books, 2021).

Stifter (1805–1868) is a master of extended and sometimes exceedingly strange description. This room makes me think of the allegory of the cave. It also makes me think of interior decoration as it might be practiced in a story by Kafka or Borges.

Motley Stones is a collection of six stories, each named for a mineral or rock.

More Stifter
A passage from The Bachelors : A passage from Rock Crystal

[According to Max Brod, Stifter was one of Kafka’s favorite writers. According to the cover copy of Motley Stones, Kafka referred to Stifter as “my fat brother.” Tourmaline is a mineral.]

How to improve writing (no. 93)

As I wrote in no. 75, “Every time I look at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, I end up rewriting one or more sentences.” And so it is today. Here’s a paragraph:

But it’s not the business model of newsletters that brings me to write about them today. It’s the more intangible or elusive qualities that makes them attractive to readers. The apparently viable business model makes them attractive to independent journalists and publications. But none of it would work if there wasn’t demonstrable demand. And that demand very clearly exists.

I noticed the error in agreement first: it’s the more intangible or elusive qualities that make them attractive to readers. But then I kept looking. Here’s an improved version:

It’s not the business model of newsletters that interests me: it’s the qualities that make newsletters attractive to readers. The business model attracts independent journalists and publications. But that model would fail if there weren’t demand among readers — and there is.

From fifty-nine words in five sentences to forty-one words in three, with no loss of meaning. What’s lost is the junk: “brings me to write about them today,” “apparently viable,” “demonstrable demand,” “very clearly exists.” I almost missed “demonstrable demand,” which of course is no different from “demand.”

*

June 27: Here’s further improvement:

It’s not the business model of newsletters that interests me: it’s the qualities that make newsletters attractive to readers. The business model that attracts independent journalists and publications would fail if there weren’t demand among readers — and there is.

Thirty-nine words across two sentences, with no loss of meaning.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 93 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

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.