Anent this post: my friend Stefan shared a link to a great plumbing story: John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Man Called Fran.” It’s short — 3,741 words. Just read it, before it disappears behind a Harper’s paywall.
Thanks, Stefan.
[I like to use the word anent every few years.]
Monday, August 21, 2023
A plumbing story
The plumber’s reward
[Click for a larger beer.]
A month or so after replacing the toilet fill valve in our upstairs bathroom, I replaced the valve in our downstairs bathroom — fifteen minutes or so of awkward work that means a quicker fill and a farewell to the bizarre float ball that always ends up needing adjustment. The bottle of A Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’ was my self-chosen reward.
In advance of doing the work, I opened my dad’s toolbox to get a smaller pliers wrench (which, it turned out, I didn’t need). The smell of Dial soap is still strong inside.
[The Fluidmaster was recommended by one of the smart employees at our local Ace Hardware. An excellent recommendation.]
Sardinecore
“From romantic lunches at eye-watering prices to must-have T-shirts and covetable clutch bags, the humble sprat is having a massive moment”: The Guardian reports on sardinecore.
Thanks, Fresca.
Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Gowanus scaffolding
[267-269 Third Avnue, Gowanus, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
Just another Third Avenue corner, taking its place with Ralph Bozzo’s restaurant and Nick’s Diner.
When I saw this photograph, I thought that’s all of New York now. Yes, I exaggerated. But 400 miles of New York City sidewalks are now coffined in scaffolding, aka sidewalk sheds. The sheds make walking an adventure in claustrophobia. Mayor Eric Adams has a plan for their removal. For now, I recommend watching an episode of How To with John Wilson: “How to Put Up Scaffolding” (Max).
No. 267 has more recently been the address of a Super 8 providing quarters for unhoused single men. If the building is still a Super 8, Google Maps shows it losing its identifying sign between November 2020 and May 2022. And there’s no scaffolding.
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
Saturday, August 19, 2023
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg, which means it’s a tough one. Yes, it 4-D, eight letters, “Stymies, so to speak.” I got it with a clue here, a clue there.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
1-A, eight letters, “Echoic acknowledgment.”I’m surprised to see that the answer as spelled is far more common than I thought.
3-D, five letters, “Numbers past a certain point.” A nice example of this puzzle’s fancy clueing.
8-D, eleven letters, “Madame Bovary or Jane Eyre.” Gosh, I haven’t heard any form of the answer in ages.
17-A, five letters, “Logging site.” Clever.
18-A, five letters, “Inspiration for Eliot’s 61 Across.” This clue baffled me a bit, as 61-A is not a title.
20-D, four letters, “Fuller shape.” I first thought “Brush?” But the clue didn’t fool me for long.
26-D, ten letters, “Personality pair addendum.” Answers that baffle me usually make sense when I begin typing out their clues. But here, I’m lost.
32-A, ten letters, “Short-term rental.” A novel answer.
46-A, four letters, “[More people should come here].” Or not!
54-D, three letters, “See reverse, shortly.” Well, this is arcane. No, it’s probably not.
61-A, eight letters, “Eliot opus misnomer.” Now I get it.
One clue-and-answer I take issue with: 9-D, six letters, “New York’s Angry Orchard, e.g.” I just don’t see how the answer goes with the brand name. And that was because, as Wittgenstein said, the limits of my language mean the limits of the world.
My favorite in this puzzle: 11-D, ten letters, “Short-term offerings.”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
Friday, August 18, 2023
More 1232 Madison
The Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott was not the only academic to have resided at 1232 Madison Avenue, the building whose WPA tax photograph starred in an OCA post this past Sunday. In 1926, Lawrence Buermeyer, who taught philosophy at New York University, resided in a 1232 apartment, where he was soundly beaten by his friend Joseph Carson, who taught philosophy at Columbia University.
[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 20, 1926. Click any image for a larger view.]
[Brooklyn Citizen, October 24, 1926.]
[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 22, 1926.]
The story attracted considerable attention, with a lengthy article in the The New York Times — “Teachers’ Fight Is Laid to Drink” — and another in Time, with the terse title “Jag.” The Time report, partly available in front of the paywall, suggests that something more than philosophical questions was at issue between the two men. At any rate, this incident makes the perhaps apocryphal story of Wittgenstein’s poker seem positively mild.
I don’t know what became of these fellows. Buermeyer (1889–1970) had at least two books to his name. Carson had at least two book reviews — one, another — to his.
One never knows what might go with a particular address. Thanks, Brian, for finding this strange story.
How to improve writing (no. 111)
I wrote a letter yesterday to the CEO an insurance company about the 109 minutes I spent on the phone trying to find out why a payment didn’t go through. The eventual answer, which came at the end of the fourth call: there was a general problem with processing payments.
The first paragraph began like so:
I am writing to describe my recent experience trying to sort out a problem with my mother's [company name] plan. I am not seeking an apology or a promise that your company will do better. I want only to describe my experience and make suggestions for improvement, suggestions that I hope your organization will take seriously.After revision:
I want to recount my recent effort to sort out a problem with my mother's [company name] plan. I’m not asking for an apology or a promise that your company will do better. I want only to recount my experience and make constructive suggestions for your consideration.Modest savings here: the paragraph went from fifty-six words to forty-seven. And the words are much better in the revision.
~ “I am writing”: There’s no need to say that. I briefly considered beginning with “Let me recount,” but I decided that I don’t want to ask for anyone’s permission.
~ “Recount” is more accurate than “describe.” Describing this experience would call for furious strings of adjectives and expletives.
~ “My recent experience trying to sort out a problem”: That’s pretty ponderous.
~ “I am not seeking an apology”: Also a bit ponderous.
~ “Suggestions for improvement, suggestions that I hope your organization will take seriously”: Again, ponderous. I think I’ve been watching too much Frasier. “Constructive suggestions for your consideration” says everything that needs to be said, and I like the touch of wit in “for your consideration.” Yes, I’m a Christopher Guest fan.
Will the CEO read the thousand-word letter that follows? I doubt it. But someone will. And God knows, they need all the constructive suggestions they can get for their user interface.
Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)
[This post is no. 111 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. I turned this paragraph into public prose by putting it in this post.]
“O Heaven, were my whiskers neglected!”
Murr in love:
E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, trans. Anthea Bell (1999).
Also from this novel
“Scholarly voracity” : “My little right paw” : Reading and writing in the dark
[From the notes to this edition: “Ovid’s De arte amandi and Manso’s Art of Love: Ovid’s famous verse work on the art of love is properly entitled Ars amatoria. Johann Kaspar Friedrich Manso (1759-1826) wrote a work thus entitled, and published in 1794, which is mocked by Goethe and Schiller in their Xenien.”
The play is As You Like It, III.ii. Signs of a lover: “A lean cheek, which you have not; a blue eye and sunken, which you have not; an unquestionable spirit, which you have not; a beard neglected, which you have not.”]
Thursday, August 17, 2023
How to lay off of Josh Marshall
[Lay off of : in the middle-school and high-school sense. “Hey, lay offa him!”]
As I’ve written before, every time I look at Talking Points Memo, I end up rewriting one or more of Josh Marshall’s sentences. It’s true. I’ve written five How to improve writing posts about his sentences — more such posts than I’ve written for any other public writer.
But now that I know that Josh Marshall doesn’t write, I’m going to lay offa him. From a 2022 Marshall post:
Relatively early in my writing career I realized that I write in a way that is different from how most people do it. I don’t actually write. Not precisely. What I do is speak in my head and basically transcribe the sounds. This sometimes leaves funny artifacts in my writing. Like many who write fast and online I have no shortage of missing words or typos, “theirs” that should be “theres” and vice versa. But that’s not what I mean. Sometimes I will actually include words which sound vaguely similar to the intended word but are not homonyms and are totally different words. They just create a similar set of sounds if you run them together in a spoken sentence. Read English sentences they can read like gibberish. but if you speak them quickly aloud the meaning will often be clear.I have no idea what it means to work in this way. But criticizing the prose that results now feels pointless. I’m gonna lay offa him.
People will sometimes point out that I’m clearly using transcription software that is screwing up. But in fact I’ve never used transcription software in my life. My brain is just wired in this particular way. There actually is transcribing. But I’m the one doing it.
But before I do, I have to point out that their s and there s would be better plural forms. Garner’s Modern English Usage: “The best way to form the plural of a word used as a word is to italicize it and append -s in roman type.” Also, there’s an as missing from the closing sentence of the first paragraph: “Read [as] English sentences.” And the period in the middle of that sentence should be a comma.
I still can’t believe that people pay to read Talking Points Memo.
Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)
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