Orange Crate Art

Saturday, June 3, 2023

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Ben Zimmer, is to my mind ideally Stumper-y. Not exceedingly difficult, but difficult enough. It has novelty: 1-A, six letters, ”NINE ____ (anagram of PUNISHMENT).” It has the defamiliarization effect: 32-A, five letters, “What clickers often augment.” It has odd rhymes: 52-D, four letters, “Ore door.” It has saucy misdirection: 61-A, seven letters, “They’re seen in shower scenes.” It has a terrific fifteen-word answer: 36-A, “One you’d expect to hustle.” It does not have a virtual-reality headset, and I could not care less.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

6-D, nine letters, “Sabermetricians, for instance.” The answer is new to me.

27-D, six letters, “Slew.” LOTSOF? TONSOF? From the toughest (west-central) part of the puzzle.

28-D, six letters, “Glorify gleamily.” Not easy to see what with all the bright light.

35-D, nine letters, “Court crime.” Feels timely.

40-A, four letters, “Muggers.” Clever.

48-D, five letters, “Aurous appellation.” I had to type out the clue to understand the answer.

54-D, four letters, “Cheaters, casually.” Or “still more casually”?

58-A, seven letters, “Ready to show some muscle.” Eww.

My favorite in this puzzle, 49-A, twelve letters, “Competitors in the IPA market?” I don’t mind a pun.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Friday, June 2, 2023

“Way up in the dangerous air”

Steven Millhauser, “Flying Carpets,” in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Whatever became of the Lisa?

Do you remember the Apple Lisa? Do you know what beacame of it? A short film from The Verge: Apple’s Secret Burial.

Thursday, June 1, 2023

Somebody Somewhere renewed

[From Bridget Everett’s Instagram.]

I’m happy to see that Somebody Somewhere has been renewed for a third season. It’s a show that deserves a much larger audience.

P.S.: It’s the anti-Succession.

A minority report on Succession

Bill Wyman (not of the Stones), writing about Succession:

From the start, this was a bad show, and a misconceived one. In a world of peak TV and oceans of post-Sopranos high-end work from around the world, this was an endeavor made by people not quite clear on the concept. There were no adults in the room. Succession was very much like what you would get if the Roy children themselves tried to do a grown-up HBO series.

I’m not enamored of this series. Wyman is far more critical than I am.

Longhand and a Smith-Corona

From Robert Caro’s Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing (New York: Knopf, 2019). Caro recalls what Princeton professor R.P. Blackmur said to him, after first saying something complimentary: “But you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.”

“Thinking with your fingers.” Every so often, do you get the feeling that someone has seen right through you? In that moment, I knew Professor Blackmur had seen right through me. No real thought, just writing — because writing was so easy. Certainly never thinking anything all the way through. And writing for a daily newspaper had been so easy, too. When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realize the complexity of the subject, realized that a lot of thinking would be required — thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of — I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210. And yet, even thus slowed down, I will, when I’m writing, set myself the goal of a minimum of a thousand words a day, and, as the chart I keep on my closet door attests, most days meet it.

If I were teaching a writing course, I’d show my students Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022).

Related reading
“Robert Caro’s Favorite Things” (The Wall Street Journal ) : “Turn Every Page: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive” (New-York Historical Society) : “Why Robert Caro Now Has Only Ten Typewriters” (The New Yorker )

Editing

From Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022). Robert Gottlieb speaking:

“Editing is intelligent and sympathetic reaction to the text and to what the author is trying to accomplish.”

And:

“Making things better, saving things, is the editorial impulse.”

And I like what Bryan Garner says:

“Editing is an act of friendship. A good editor is making you look smarter than you actually are — smarter and better.”

Also from this movie
Taped to the lamp

Taped to the lamp

From Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022). Robert Caro speaking:

“How do you make the reader feel how desperate a man is, not just read it, but feel it, but see it, and feel it himself, feel this desperation of Lyndon Johnson himself? And right on an index card and Scotch-taped to the lamp in front of me: ‘Is there desperation on this page?’ And I can't tell ya how many days that card stays up there.”

In the documentary, there’s a different card taped to the lamp.

[“The only thing that matters is what is on this page.” Click for a larger view.]

Also from this movie
Robert Gottlieb on editing

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

F.S. Royster Guano Co. notebook

[An antiques-mall find ($2.00). 5¼″ × 3″. Click for a larger view.]

According to a 2019 newspaper article, the F.S. Royster Guano Company began in 1885 in Tarboro, North Carolina. This notebook gives Norfolk, Virgina, as the main office, with sixteen other plants and offices in the south and midwest.

Inside this book, useful information — brief explanations of what different plant foods do, guidelines for measuring grain and lumber, a recipe for house paint (lead and zinc), 1943 and 1944 calendars on the inside covers. And thirty-two pages for writing, each with seventeen lines below a heading, a different heading on each page. For instance,

With ROYSTER’S Under Your Crop
a Load is Off Your Mind.

I’m not sure if that’s meant to be funny. If it is meant so, it’s the only such heading that is.

As you may know, agricultural notebooks are a primary inspiration for the contemporary Field Notes Brand.