“You’re sitting in a tree, Cath”

Catherine is troubled. She and Peter Schiller went down the hill together, on one sled, he on top of her. He said “Love you” or “I love you” in her ear.

Steven Millhauser, “The Sledding Party,” in In the Penny Arcade (1986).

A Salingeresque moment, I’d say.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Ducks?

[“Sole Music.” Zippy, March 25, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy made me wonder: are they still called duck boots?

A DuckDuckGo search (heh) for l l bean duck boots turns up L.L. Bean pages with duck in the title: e.g., “The Original Duck Boot”. But go the page, and there’s no duck. Look at the page source (which I don’t really know how to make sense of), and duck is in there. Search the Bean site for duck boots, and boots show up, minus duck. Search the Bean site for duck alone, and nothing shows up. But: “We did find results for ‘duskiness.’”

My guess is that associations with guns and hunting make it simpler for L.L. Bean to keep the duck part quiet.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[The label on my newish Bean Boot Gumshoes says “Bean Boots.” My old ones wore out after thirty years or so.]

“God, you’re prejudiced”

Eleanor Schumann, a chronic absentee, a high-school Annabel Lee (though she hates Poe), keeper of her own Childhood Museum (accessed via a door in the back wall of a closet), has changed. Arthur Grumm, who visits Eleanor in her bedroom after school, doesn’t like it.

Steven Millhauser, Portrait of a Romantic (1977).

That’s the last passage I’m posting from Portrait of a Romantic, It’s a terrific novel, exploring several varieties of adolescent experience, as recounted by a former adolescent — twenty-nine-year-old Grumm, one who made it out, at least sort of.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Perimeter oscillations

Wow:

The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations. This new identity manifests itself in an authentic geometry that is to become proprietary to the Pepsi culture.

I’m not sure how I came to notice this document, a 2008 working proposal for a redesign of the Pepsi logo by “brand guru” Peter Arnell. Newsweek deemed it real. If it’s not real, it’s at least real gone.

[Speaking of branding: Pepsi-Cola became Pepsi in 1961. Who knew?]

Menuwhere

Menuwhere is a tiny app from Many Tricks that opens a Mac app’s menu wherever you are on the screen. This page offers a complete explanation. I like the developers’ sense of humor: “Menuwhere isn’t available on the Mac App Store due to the store’s restrictions on newly-released utilities that actually do useful things.” Only $3. Fun to play with while waiting for news of an indictment.

Willis Reed (1942–2023)

The New York Knicks center has died at the age of eighty. The New York Times has an obituary, with a video feature about game seven of the 1970 NBA championship series.

[I don’t pay attention to sports now, but I was a big Knicks fan back in the day.]

Aldi and Garfunkel

[Click for a much larger view and look closely.]

I know from a friend that this arrangement is not found in every Aldi. I hope someone at our Aldi meant for it to be noticed.

Douglas Ewart in New York (and in The New York Times)

“Some artists earn the ‘multi-hyphenate’ label by doing two or three things. But Douglas R. Ewart works on a whole other level”: The New York Times reports on a night of art and performance. With eight photographs and a link to a recording of a 1981 performance.

Related reading
Five more Douglas Ewart posts

Brian Cox pronounces Scotch whisky names

As the post title says. There are many, all single malts.

Our household has now watched the first three seasons of Succession. ★★★, I’d say. Too much repetition, too many improbably spontaneous zingers. Here’s Brian Cox as Logan Roy, pronouncing the same two words, again and again. Second word off. Probably NSFW if you’re not in the inner circle at Waystar Royco.

It really can

I’m surprised to see that I’ve never made mentioned of this recording (which won’t embed): it’s a Betty Carter interpretation of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” (Fran Landesman-Tommy Wolf). Recorded in 1964, with Harold Mabern Jr., piano; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Roy McCurdy, drums.

I played this recording once for a class. I’m not sure what the context was — spring? Sappho’s sense of eros as glukupikron (sweetbitter)? What I am sure about: that class was struck silent. Serious stuff. Music of the Grownups.