A Robert Walser biography

Susan Bernofsky, Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. viii + 378 pages. $35.

Translator and, now, biographer Susan Bernofsky’s Clairvoyant of the Small is a brilliant account of Robert Walser’s life, deeply researched, and deeply respectful of its subject, recording Walser’s idiosyncrasies and strangenesses while never reducing him to a condition or attempting a diagnosis in retrospect. The writing is full of inventive turns of phrase along the way, as when Bernofsky describes the inveterate walker Walser’s frequent shifts of residence (she counts sixty-six known addresses between 1878 and 1929) as “a slow-motion real-estate version of walking.” Here is the gist of Walser’s work in one beautiful sentence: “The marginality he celebrates is that of secretly magnificent complexities hiding in plain sight all around us under the guise of the ordinary and small.” A clairvoyant of the small indeed.

For anyone curious about reading Walser in English, I recommend The Walk, from New Directions (Susan Bernofsky’s revision of Christopher Middleton’s translation).

Related reading
All OCA Walser posts (Pinboard)

[The phrase “clairvoyant of the small” comes from Jo Catling’s English translation of W.G. Sebald’s essay about Walser, “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” in A Place in the Country (New York: Modern Library, 2013). Catling gives Sebald’s German: “ein Hellseher im Kleinen,” which borrows from Walser’s “dafür ist es ihm vergönnt gewesen, in seiner kleinen hell zu sehen,” which Catling translates as “he has been granted the gift of farsightedness in his own small world.” Catling notes that “‘Hellsehen’ (‘seeing clearly’) has in German the additional meaning of clairvoyance.”]

Pomotroid

Pomotroid is a free Pomodoro timer by Christopher Murphy for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The app marks time with a clock-like ring, red for the Pomodoro, green for the break. On the Mac, the ring sits in the menu bar, tiny and unobtrusive. And on the Mac Pomotroid has a minor display problem that I hope will be fixed.

I still like Flow, but a ring in the menu bar is a nice alternative to watching time run down by the second.

A related post
The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated

Naming of parts

From The New York Times: “Taking the ‘Shame Part’ Out of Female Anatomy.” The word in question: pudendum. I knew about hysteria, but not pudendum. It’s patriarchy, inscribed in the language of anatomy.

Dip Night

In honor of Only Murders in the Building, tonight is Dip Night: baba ghanoush, hummus, carrot and celery sticks, orange and yellow pepper slices, Kalamata olives, and pita. Viewers of the show will understand. Dip Night is Elaine’s idea, prompted by an abudance of eggplant from a friend’s garden.

Are we alone in this kind of TV-centric whimsy?

A newly identified Van Gogh

Smithsonian magazine reports on a newly identified Vincent van Gogh drawing, made with the simplest materials:

Van Gogh used a carpenter’s pencil to draw the scene on a 19- by 12-inch sheaf of watercolor paper. He finished off lighter parts of the composition by rubbing pellets of bread on the coarse surface, then applied a fixative made from milk and water to better emphasize the dark pencil strokes.

Related reading
All OCA Van Gogh posts (Pinboard)
When to capitalize Van Gogh

One letter, two pages, six points

Today’s installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American should make any right-thinking person’s head spin. It begins with a two-page, six-point memo for stealing a presidential election.

Just One Thing, a podcast

A worthwhile podcast from the BBC: Just One Thing, with Michael Mosley. Each short episode is devoted to one suggestion for better health. Much of the evidence is anecdotal (“I’m sleeping better”), and at least one suggestion (about the superior benefits of short bursts of exercise) has been challenged by more recent research. But any podcast that recommends morning walks, time spent in nature, and the consumption of dark chocolate is all right by me.

Index, A review of

“Like writing and the printed book, indexes created excitement as well as anxiety, just as digital aids do now”: from Anthony Grafton’s review of Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of the.

More about Index, A History of the on the publisher’s page. The book arrives in the States next February.

Thanks to Gunther at Lexikaliker for letting me know about this book.

[My favorite index: that of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Gunther tells me it’s mentioned in Duncan's book.]

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Pinboard tags They appear to be working again.

Idol worship

[Zippy, September 19, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, Little Zippy has spotted a statue on the sidewalk. He brings it home in a red wagon. Purpose: “I’m going to idolize you!”

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts

[And for anyone who needs to know: Bill Griffith has a biography of Ernie Bushmiller in the works.]