It’s on

Brand-new news:

Stephen K. Bannon, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s top aides early in his presidency, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Friday on two counts of contempt of Congress, the Justice Department said. . . .

“Since my first day in office, I have promised Justice Department employees that together we would show the American people by word and deed that the department adheres to the rule of law, follows the facts and the law and pursues equal justice under the law,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

“Today’s charges reflect the department’s steadfast commitment to these principles,” Mr. Garland said.

I wonder how many shirts they let you wear under an orange jumpsuit.

Anticipatory plagiarism

[Nancy, November 12, 2021.]

It’s “a famous quote” that circulates online and off, attributed to the sociologist Robert K. Merton:

Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.

A source? There never is one. In Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998), for instance, Anne Fadiman quotes this sentence, attributes it to Merton, and adds

I am unable to provide a citation because my source is a yellow Post-it handed to me by my brother in Captiva, Florida, in November 1996.

Merton comes close to the words “anticipatory plagiarism” in On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (1965), which looks into the history of the aphorism “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Here’s Merton:

Newton then makes a profoundly sociological observation about the behavior of men in general and by implication, the behavior of men of science in particular, that, until this moment, I had thought I was the first to have made. That anticipatory plagiarist, Newton, follows the sentences I have just quoted from his letter with this penetrating observation

— and so on. Notice that there’s nothing here of a definition. Merton is making a quick joke: he had a thought, but Newton had it first, dammit.

And Winston Churchill had “anticipatory plagiarism” first, or at least before Merton. Here’s Churchill, May 19, 1927, with a remark collected in The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill (2009) and elsewhere. Churchill was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, addressing the House of Commons:

Mr Lowe seems to have been walking over my footsteps before I had trodden them, because he said, trying to explain what had occurred to the satisfaction of a very strict House in those days: “And so each year will take money from its successor, and this process may go till the end of time, although how it will be settled when the world comes to an end I am at a loss to know.” It was unconscious anticipatory plagiarism.

The weird thing: I recently mentioned anticipatory plagiarism in an e-mail to a friend, tried to recall the source, looked it up, and found Robert K. Merton. But had I remembered a 2013 Orange Crate Art post about cupcakes and handwriting, I would have had it right. And if I had not read Nancy this morning, I would not have thought to write this post.

[Lowe: Robert Lowe.]

Domestic comedy

“I knew it had to be a fragrance commercial, because it was completely incoherent.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

An EXchange name sighting

[It fills the screen. From Hollywood Story (dir. William Castle, 1951). Click for a larger view.]

GRanite? GReen? Both were Los Angeles exchange names. And yes, there were two-letter four-digit telephone numbers.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Craig’s Wife : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Escape in the Fog : Fallen Angel : Framed : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : This Gun for Hire : The Unfaithful : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Veterans Day

[“Millions to Pray for Peace Today: Celebration of Third Anniversary of the Armistice Will Extend All Over the World.” The New York Times, November 11, 1921.]

The first World War ended on November 11, 1918. Armistice Day was observed the next year. In 1954, Armistice Day became Veterans Day.

Pannapacker on academic woe

William Pannapacker will soon be leaving academia. He writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education about being “Tenured, Trapped, and Miserable in the Humanities”:

How many of us understood what we were embarking upon when we decided to become professors? How could we even grasp the accelerating rate of change in higher education: neoliberal managerial approaches; part-time, no-benefit, transient adjunct teaching; the uncapping of mandatory retirement and the graying of the profession; the withdrawal of state funding; the endless political attacks from all directions; the unsustainable increases in student debt; and, with all that, declining enrollments in any field that does not lead directly and obviously to employment?

Even now, in my experience, if you point out these trends, you risk being accused by students of “crushing their dreams” and by colleagues, in effect, of “disrupting the Ponzi.”

I would never have called myself trapped or miserable. (Tenured, yes!) But life in academia ain’t what it used to be, if indeed it ever was. Something I wrote to a colleague not long ago:

I think every day about how fortunate I am to be retired, and how fortunate I was to be in on many good years of English studies. Any of us who were in there beat some long odds, getting longer all the time.

[Pannapacker’s celebrated Chronicle piece “Remedial Civility Training” should be required reading in college. It’s back behind the Chronicle paywall, but you can read a long excerpt in this blog post. The whole piece is also here.]

Pixels and iPads

The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial (who’s also working as an attorney for the defense) appears to believe the defense’s bogus claim that pinching and zooming on an iPhone adds pixels to and thus alters an image. And the prosecutor, who couldn’t provide a clear explanation of high-resolution images, also couldn’t answer the defense’s (bogus?) question about what operating system an iPad uses. (It’s iPadOS.)

Arc, narrative, lacking in dictionary

From Decoy (dir. Jack Bernhard, 1946). Morgue attendants in conversation, as one of them reads a dictionary:

“D-i, die, c-h-o-t, chot, o-m-y: die-chot-o-mee.” ‌[Laughs.] “Ain’t that a lulu? And get this one: die-dack-tick.” [Laughs again.]

“Hey, why don’t you stop reading that junk?”

“What’s the matter with the dictionary?”

“There ain’t enough story to it.”

Film fans will recognize the dictionary reader, the anonymous “Thin Morgue Attendant” (Louis Mason) as the man who’s going back home to starve all at once in The Grapes of Wrath. His antagonist is “Fat Morgue Attendant,” aka Benny (Ferris Taylor). Perhaps inspired by the pair of clowns in Hamlet ?

See also W.H. Auden, “Prologue: Reading,” in The Dyer’s Hand (1962):

Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously “truer” than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

A sardine calendar

Here’s a startling headline: “Man builds handmade sardine advent calendar for Christmas” (The Irish News):

A festive creator has enjoyed the reaction “from all over” after he shared his handmade 2021 sardine advent calendar on social media.

Charles Vestal, from Berlin, Germany, told the PA news agency that what started as a “passion project/joke” has prompted interest from hundreds of strangers online.

“I present to you the 2021 sardine advent calendar, filled with 24 Portuguese tinned fish delights to enjoy all December long,” he tweeted — the post has since accrued more than 3,000 likes.

“I’ve always kind of liked advent calendars,” the 38-year-old said.

Here’s the Twitter thread detailing the calendar’s creation.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[I don’t know why advent is uncapitalized in this article.]

Sluggo and charlotte russe

[Nancy, February 15, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

These panels remind me of the opening scene of the film version of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in which Spiros Antanopoulos (Chuck McCann) breaks a bakery window to get at the cakes and cookies. Elaine and I watched the film a couple of nights ago.

These panels also remind me of the description of John Keats in William Butler Yeats’s poem “Ego Dominus Tuus”:

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop
    window

Like Yeats’s Keats, Sluggo too is “Shut out from all the luxury of the world.” Which includes charlotte russe — even if Sluggo is eyeing the cakes. Notice, next to the cakes: that’s charlotte russe.

These two panels preface a final one (the one Ernie Bushmiller called “the snapper”), in which a cat stares at a fish frozen in a block of ice that sits on the sidewalk. “I guess I’m not the only one,” says Sluggo.

Did ice usually get delivered with a fish in it?

Related reading
All OCA charlotte russe posts : Nancy and charlotte russe : Nancy and more charlotte russe