Orange Crate Art

Friday, August 5, 2022

Nancy meta

[Nancy, September 23, 1949. Click for a larger view.]

The final panel explains: E. Bushmiller broke his glasses.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[In the final panel, I like the way the hallway and door are nice and neat. Only Nancy and Sluggo, the products of the artist’s pen, are messed up there.]

Thursday, August 4, 2022

“Strange fishes withouten heads”

From the “Oxen of the Sun” episode. The scene is the National Maternity Hospital. Leopold Bloom has stopped in to ask after Molly’s friend Mina Purefoy, in her third day of labor with her ninth child. Here Bloom encounters a group of unruly drinkers: medical students and Stephen Dedalus. The episode is a series of imitations of English prose styles, beginning with a chant and ending in manic American revival talk, commercialese, and slang:

You’ll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God. Pflaaaap! Not half. He’s got a coughmixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in his backpocket. Just you try it on.

The following passage is recognized as an imitation of the fantastic travel narratives of the fourteenth-century writer Sir John Mandeville. The “castle” is the hospital. See if you can figure out what’s described.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

Freddish

From The Atlantic, Maxwell King’s “Mister Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children,” a look at what a producer and writer from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood called Freddish:

Hedda Sharapan, one of the staff members at Fred Rogers’s production company, Family Communications, Inc., recalls Rogers once halted taping of a show when a cast member told the puppet Henrietta Pussycat not to cry; he interrupted shooting to make it clear that his show would never suggest to children that they not cry.

Orange Crate Art is a Neighborhood-friendly zone.

Related reading
All OCA Fred Rogers posts (Pinboard)

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

“Longest way round”

Bloom thinks about himself and Molly. From the “Nausicaa” episode:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

See also Stephen Dedalus on how we are “always meeting ourselves.”

Bloom seems to apply an unusual spin on the traditional adage.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

4:17?

It was a late-afternoon class, the first after a long break, perhaps for Thanksgiving, so long a break that I wasn’t sure of the room number. 311? 310? 309? I looked through the doors and saw my class in 309. I was teaching Gilgamesh and wasn’t sure where we were picking up, but I figured out that we must have had two classes on the work to go. I wanted to say something about an American Experience episode about Erroll Garner that was airing that night on PBS, but I thought I should save that for the end of the class.

I assigned the last sections of Gilgamesh for the next class and began to do a little recapping when I noticed that the clock in the room was off. And everyone’s phone told a different time. The Daylight to Standard Time change must have kicked in, or Standard to Daylight. Anyway, the class was underway. “I am doing what is called lecturing,” I said, and I was doing quite well, talking about Gilgamesh, Humbaba, Eve and Adam, and divine rage. I noticed Roscoe Mitchell sitting in on the class. Wow. He was wearing a tie, as he often does when performing. I recognized him immediately, of course.

All at once, everyone streamed out. The clock on the wall said 4:17, but in fact the time was 4:50. Class over.

This is the twenty-fourth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. In all but one, something has gone wrong.

*

Perhaps the strangest thing about this dream: it happened earlier this morning. Roscoe Mitchell was born on August 3, 1940.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

[In waking life, the change from Daylight to Standard or back often left classroom clocks all awry for days — off not by an hour but by some random stretch of minutes. Call Building Services!]

In Kansas

Take that!

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

A catalogue

From the “Cyclops” episode, set in Barney Kiernan’s pub. An exaggeratedly heroic description of the clothing of the Citizen, an unnamed Irish nationalist whose presence dominates the episode. Joyce’s catalogues are always a delight.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

A genuine misunderstanding

I realized sometime recently that when I was a very young boy in the early 1960s, watching Adventures of Superman on WPIX (“channel 11”), I thought that the bad guys and crooks were real bad guys and crooks playing versions of themselves. It didn’t occur to me that they were actors.

See also Elaine’s thought about TV housewives.

[Adventures of Superman ran from 1952 to 1958. I was watching reruns.]