“Deeper matters”

V. quotes liberally from The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, Mr. Goodman’s biography of V.’s half-brother:

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

Goodman represents of course the kind of critical writing that Nabokov despised. One of the no-nos from Nabokov’s quiz about requirements for a good reader: “The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.” Nabokov’s requirements: “imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.”

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

[Nabokov’s quiz appears in Lectures on Literature (1980).]

Sinatra’s spoken-word album

I found it browsing in a record store: Frank Sinatra’s The Outfit, a spoken-word album about wine. Elaine assured me that the album was real.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[In waking life, “The Outfit” is something else.]

Dr. Jerome Adams makes a metaphor

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer just interviewed Dr. Jerome Adams, who served as Surgeon General under the previous President. Blitzer tried hard to put appropriate words in Adams’s mouth: You’d like for the former president to come out strongly in favor of vaccines, wouldn’t you? Yeah, sure. But Adams said that what he would really like is for Democrats to stop politicizing vaccines.

(What?)

But here’s the metaphor, roughly paraphrased: God gave us a miracle (the vaccine). But salvation is only available to those who accept it.

So he’s — what? — theologizing the vaccine? Holy — never mind.

How to delete an inaccessible note (Mac Stickies)

I found myself with a mysterious problem on my Mac: a note in the Stickies app was inaccessible. The note showed up when I right-clicked on the app icon in the Dock but was nowhere to be found on the Desktop. Thus it was impossible to delete. Quitting Stickies and restarting the Mac did nothing. Searching the Internets turned up nothing. Here is a solution:

In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Stickies/Data/
Library/Stickies

(The tilde signifies your user name. You can get to Library by pressing the Option key after opening the Go menu from the Finder. You can get to the needed folder by going to the Library and searching the Library for stickies.)

Open the Stickies folder, examine its contents, and find the .rtfd file with the text of the inaccessible note. Copy the text to make a new note if you want, and then delete the file.

My Mac problems tend to be odd, trivial, and deeply annoying. This has been one of them.

Larry Butler Yeats

Larry David, with “a big job to do,” asks a men’s room attendant (Adrian Martinez) to grant him some privacy and step out of the room. But it’s Harold’s job to stay in there. From the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode “The Ugly Section” (March 1, 2020):

“I’m a dying animal.”

“I dunno what to tell you.”

[If Yeats — “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is” — is not behind this exchange, I’m giving someone way too much credit.]

First glimpses of the little gang

“I have to admit, the parasol didn’t seem to be producing exactly the effect that I had hoped for”: from “Young Girls,” Deborah Treisman’s translation of a passage from the long-lost Proust manuscript now in print as Les soixante-quinze feuillets. The passage gives us the narrator’s first glimpses of what will become “the little gang” of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. The girls are already aloof and modern; the narrator, already hapless.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“Smear shots”

[A New York Times headline, July 12, 2021.]

For a moment I thought that Fox News was hosting smear shots — people taking potshots and smearing the idea of vaccination. Which of course is what they do.

The headline is a garden-path sentence, and as it’s a headline, it’s also known as a crash blossom.

Other garden paths
“Cultured klepto” : “Father of off-duty cop” : “Virtually everything”

Innovation-speak, &c.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lee Vinsel writes about “innovation-speak and business bullshit” in higher education:

An administrator friend sent me a quotation about a faculty member’s work he’d provided to his university’s PR person. It was full of platitudes and nonsense about innovation, discovery, and a much-improved future that the work would create “impactfully.” My friend said he came up with the words in under 10 seconds while in a Zoom meeting on another topic with soccer playing on a television in the background and several social-media and messaging apps open on his phone and laptop.

It is worth striving to bring university communications within the realm of truth-seeking, but doing so would require universities that are quite different than the ones we have today. You have to imagine universities where the felt need to produce words does not outpace the time to think. The root of our word “school” is the Greek word skholē, meaning leisure or free time. To create a school is to create space for thought.

Lee Vinsel teaches at Virginia Tech. He has a website about his work.

[You can dodge the Chronicle’s sign-up request by choosing your browser’s Reader View or by using the Kill Sticky Headers bookmarklet.]

Letterlocking

Letterlocking: a way to keep your correspondence confidential.

Found via Mike Brown’s Oddments of High Unimportance.

Goodbye, Hackensack Record King

After fifty-six years, Hackensack Record King is closing. But not for lack of customers.

Thanks to the New Jersey reader who sent the news.

A related post
Shopping on Main Street, Hackensack