“An old picture postcard”

Our narrator, V., has seen a diary reporting the weather on December 31, 1899, the day of his half-brother Sebastian’s birth. The diary belongs to “an old Russian lady” with the Nabokovian name Olga Olegovna Orlova, and it describes the day as “a fine windless one,” temperature twelve below zero.

Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941).

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

[A droshky is a carriage.]

Recently updated

“America’s flavourite candy” Now with turkey joints.

iA Writer

[A draft. Click for a much larger view.]

Here’s a word in favor of iA Writer, which has become my favorite app for writing in iOS and macOS. No toolbar (unless you want to see one), beautifully designed monospaced fonts, and the joys of Markdown, which I should have started using years ago. Markdown makes for a much more congenial writing environment than HTML, and with keyboard shortcuts, it’s a cinch to learn. Did I mention that I should have started using Markdown years ago?

To create a blog post from a Markdown file,. I select the text, choose Copy HTML, and paste into the Blogger Compose window. Then I remove the paragraph tags — <p></p> — at the beginning and end of the text. (Blogger likes line breaks — <br /><br /> — between paragraphs, made in Markdown with the backward slash.)

In macOS, I still also write in MarsEdit, which also uses Markdown. I tend to think of MarsEdit as the app for writing something to post immediately, iA Writer as the app for writing something I’ll post at some point. I wrote this post this morning in iA Writer.

iA Writer is available for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. All versions have many more features than I’ve mentioned here. (HTML Preview is one.) All but the iOS app allow a free trial. Support via e-mail is friendly and fast. iA Writer is one (or two) of the best apps I’ve ever bought.

Did I mention that I should have started using Markdown years ago?

[The strikethrough that begins the screenshot draft is brought to you by iA Writer’s optional Style Check, which flags possible clichés, fillers, redundancies, and words and phrases of the writer’s choosing, but doesn’t overrule the writer. My only relation to iA Writer is that of a happy customer and careful writer.]

“America’s flavourite candy”

[Life, January 17, 1949. Click for a larger view.]

Butterscotch and nutmeats? You had me at “bones.”

Here is older evidence of this now-gone candy. An unrelated candy, Ganong Chicken Bones (cinnamon and chocolate), is still manufactured. Another treat: Chick-o-Sticks (peanut butter and coconut), also once known as Chicken Bones.

*

There are also turkey joints. Thanks, librarian!

Nuts in Illinois

My representative in Congress is hosting another member of Congress, the xenophobic space-laser Q lady, at a July fund-raising event in a nearby city.

It’s curious: my rep makes no mention of this event on Facebook or Twitter. It’s almost — almost! — as if she’d rather have only diehard acolytes see just how far to the right she is. Fly below the radar, Mary, or try to. News organizations already know.

No Compromise, a podcast series

No Compromise is a podcast series from NPR, and winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting:

Discover a social media empire with an unapologetic vision of gun rights—generating millions of likes, follows, and dollars. From WAMU’s Guns & America, reporters Lisa Hagen of WABE and Chris Haxel of KCUR expose how three brothers from the most uncompromising corner of the gun debate are turning hot-button issues into donations and controversy.

Listening to this podcast has given me much greater insight into the people who (supposedly) represent me in the House of Representatives and the Illinois House. For instance.

“The oats had vanished at last”

Lord, it is time. Summer was very great, as the poet says. The children and their parents must leave grandmother’s country manor for the city.


And then it’s time to return.

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

The rhythms of the natural world are very much part of Stifter’s fiction. But so is natural or supranatural catastrophe. That’s still to come in this story, along with an astonishing rescue performed by a wild child before she disappears into the forest.

I’ve borrowed the first line of Ted Berrigan’s translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Herbsttag”: “Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross.” “Very great” seems to me a perfect way to characterize a summer. How was your summer, man? It was very great.

More Stifter
A passage from The Bachelors : A passage from Rock Crystal : A passage from “Tourmaline”

[Ted Berrigan’s translation of Rilke appears as “Autumn’s Day” in Nothing for You (1977). The first line, quoted here, appears as the first line of Sonnet IV in The Sonnets (1964). The absence of commas from “potatoes cabbage and turnips” is deliberate: as the translator explains, Stifter sometimes omits commas “to create subtle rhythmic affects, convey shifts of tone in spoken dialogue, or allow the items in a list to merge in one unbroken flow.” Cat-silver is a name for mica.]

Subway map debate

From Gothamist: “The Secret History Of The Great Subway Map Debate Of 1978 Revealed.” The debate is the subject of a new book, The New York Subway Map Debate, edited by Gary Hustwit, director of the (great) documentary Helvetica.

“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.]