From Cartoons

A teaser, not a spoiler. Jeffrey Cartwright will go on to provide an extended summary of Cartoons.

Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972).

If this passage isn’t enough to move someone to read the novel, I don’t know what is.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Another ChatGPT fail

From a 500-word ChatGPT production:

Lillian Mountweazel was a famous photographer and sculptor in the 20th century. She was born in Bangs, Ohio, on May 11, 1942 and died in an explosion on August 2, 1973, while on assignment for a photographic encyclopedia. Mountweazel’s work was known for its unusual themes and the inventive use of light and shadows, and was a major influence on the American art scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

Hundreds of words follow. But what ChatGPT doesn’t understand is that Lillian Mountweazel was not a real person. I won’t tell if you won’t.

The Lillian Virginia Mountweazel Research Collection has much more about Mountweazel’s life and work.

Related posts
A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT : Spot the bot : Teachers and chatbots : Imaginary lines from real poems

“THAT AIN’T HAY”

Edwin courts the mysterious and sometimes terrifying Rose Dorn. A partial inventory.

Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972).

Does Steven Millhauser understand certain varieties of American childhood? Does he ever.

This passage made me think of Drake’s clickers, little toys once included in boxes of Drake’s cakes. And my goodness — there are Drake’s clickers for sale at eBay.

*

March 2: Elaine and I realized it only after reading more Millhauser: Rose Dorn’s name suggests Dornröschen, Little Briar Rose, aka Sleeping Beauty. The name turns up repeatedly in Millhauser’s fiction.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

“Raucous go-go”

You know what Robert Caro says: Turn every page. Thus I found myself looking at a David Brooks profile of Bono in the December Atlantic, “The Too-Muchness of Bono.” For your consideration:

Rowing for heaven by day and drinking with superstars by night — Bono’s spiritual adventure is the greatest high-wire act in show business. You can’t help wondering which way he’ll go. Will he be ruled by his rage or his compassion? Can he find inner stillness amid the raucous go-go of his life? Can he keep his focus on the celestial spheres when the people on the beach at Nice are so damn sexy? Can he die to self, or has his permanent tendency toward self-seriousness and pomposity become too great? If the guy is so concerned with his soul, why did he spend so much time writing about his hair? The ultimate questions at the center of it all are the same ones that have haunted American history: Can you be great and also good? Can you serve the higher realm while partying your way through this one?

And while I think of it, I’ll recommend the David Brooks episode of Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri’s podcast If Books Could Kill. I’ll recommend all the other episodes too.

Two more posts about Brooks
He misunderstands the term SNOOT : He says that everyone in the 1980s wanted “more integration and less bigotry”

Beauty , defined, undefined

The CEO of Coty, Sue Y. Nabi, is writing to dictionaries to encourage new definitions of beauty. There is of course a hashtag: #beautyundefined. Nabi is quoted in Harper’s Bazaar:

“Of course, not all people are impacted by, or feel excluded by these definitions. But the implicit ageism and sexism in the examples were born in a different time. We believe it’s time to bridge the gap — time to bring the definition to where society is today. By changing the definition, if more people feel included — feel beautiful — there will be a ripple effect which touches us all.”

It [the campaign] doesn’t suggest a specific alternative, though. “At Coty, we believe that no one can control or dictate what is, or is not, beautiful,” Nabi says. Indeed, the campaign aims to “undefine” rather than simply “redefine” beauty, so that no one feels excluded by the definition or examples that accompany it.

There’s a certain incoherence in this effort: is the call for new definitions, or no definitions?

Merriam-Webster’s entry for beauty includes this definition and sample sentences:

: a beautiful person or thing
His new car’s a real beauty.

especially : a beautiful woman
She was a great beauty in her day.

And from the American Heritage Dictionary entry :

One that is beautiful, especially a beautiful woman.

The ageism of “in her day” could easily be excised. But the especially is reasonable: it is the case that the words beauty and beautiful have more often described women than men. And it’s important to notice that neither dictionary states what constitutes beauty. M-W :

the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit

And AHD :

a quality or combination of qualities that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is often associated with properties such as harmony of form or color, proportion, authenticity, and originality

Does Nabi realize that these definitions apply not just to people but to art, music, &c.? Either way, there’s something risible about the head of a cosmetics conglomerate pushing for a redefinition — or undefinition — of beauty.

Don’t miss the photograph that accompanies the Harper’s Bazaar article, showing models wearing lots of makeup. At least one model appears to be wearing colored contact lenses.

A related post
Being wrong about beauty

Music history, rhyming?

LL Cool J, in the PBS documentary series Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World:

“DJs intially are like bandleaders, right? They were like Count Basie. And then the same way in bebop that people started singing to those riffs, how the vocalists became front and center, and how Count Basie moved a little bit to the background, that’s kind of the same thing that happened with the DJs and the MCs. You know, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.”

It’s a passing moment, but one that caught my attention. Suffice it to say that history here is neither repeating nor rhyming. Or suffice it to say that the purported history recounted here, of Count Basie taking a back seat to singers singing bebop riffs, has no basis in history.

This series, which I learned about when watching the PBS NewsHour last night, is filled with great archival footage. There’s an awkward shift from an emphasis on the turmoil of the 1960s to hip-hop, which began as party music, for dancing, socializing, and good times. But then Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” comes in, and the documentary’s emphasis turns to music as cultural commentary and protest. What the documentary fails to mention is that the group was reluctant to record that song. Melle Mel, in 1992: “We didn’t actually want to do ‘The Message’ because we was used to doing party raps and boasting how good we are and all that.”

[Quote Investigator covers history repeating and rhyming.]

“We clearly f-ed this one up”

“We clearly f-ed this one up and it’s being fixed”: in New York City, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Communications Director Tim Minton comments on a mispelling of Georgia O’Keeffe’s name in stone. Just a single f .

Related reading
All OCA misspelling posts (Pinboard)

From an interview with Bryan Garner

From Oxford University Press: Sarah Butcher interviews Bryan Garner, “the least stuffy grammarian around.” She asks how it happened that the teenaged Garner fell in love with books of English usage:

You’re asking me to psychoanalyze myself? Okay, it’s true. When I was four, in 1962, my grandfather used Webster’s Second New International Dictionary as my booster seat. I started wondering what was in that big book.

Then, in 1974, when I was 15, one of the most important events of my life took place. A pretty girl in my neighborhood, Eloise, said to me, with big eyes and a smile: “You know, you have a really big vocabulary.” I had used the word facetious, and that prompted her comment.

It was a life-changing moment. I would never be the same.

I will mention again something I’ve mentioned only twice in these pages: I was a member of the panel of critical readers for the recently published fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage.

Related reading
All OCA Bryan Garner posts (Pinboard)

Crafted, baked

I noticed this morning: Pepperidge Farm now packages its bread as “Crafted Baked Goods.” The company is not alone.

Orange Crate Art is not friendly to craft — a vogue word, to be sure. School assignments are crafted. City ordinances are crafted. Movies are crafted — from scratch. The vitamin and mineral supplement Airborne is crafted, specially crafted. Poems of course are not just crafted but well-crafted. And some baked goods are handcrafted. No doubt from scratch.

“Most valuble”

I don’t follow sports, but I do follow misspelling.

Related reading
All OCA misspelling posts (Pinboard)