“Thick with virtual dust”

From a New York Review Books e-mail:

In 2016, Phillip Lopate, who has been writing essays and thinking about the essay for decades now, turned his attention to one of the essay’s offshoots, the blog, a form by that time already thick with virtual dust. Lopate committed to writing a weekly blog about, really, whatever over the course of a year.

And now it’s 2023, and those blog posts (themselves thick with dust?) are being sold as a book. Except that they’re not really blog posts. Lopate was writing what might better be called a weekly column for The American Scholar. Some blog!

[If the word blog applies, Lopate committed, really, to writing a weekly post. A phrase in his final entry — “what my next week’s blog will be about” — suggests that he used the word blog to refer to both the whole and the part.]

Seeing and smelling

“The judge was smart enough to smell a rat when she saw it”: Representative Tom Tiffany (WI-35), mangling an old idiom at the Merrick Gatland show trial just now.

Tiffany voted against accepting the results of the 2020 presidential election. He also voted against making Juneteenth a national holiday. I smell a rat.

[The first citation for smell a rat in Green’s Dictionary of Slang : c. 1529.]

Travel by plane and book

Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1981).

The “you” of this passage is a character in the novel, a reader who is now reading On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon by Takakumi Ikoka. That novel is one of ten (imaginary) novels that the reader in/of this novel encounters, each in the form of a few pages.

Postmodern play aside, this passage captures what flying always feels like to me: it’s not being anywhere.

Also from this novel
The formula : Novels and theories : “A fairly precise notion of the book”

[I am not now flying.]

Got stamps?

[Dustin, September 20, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Dustin: Paterfamilias Ed is looking for stamps. Snarky Meg wonders who still uses them. Some of us do, Meg. And we mail early in the day and use ZIP codes.

Related reading
All OCA mail and stamp posts (Pinboard)

[I have heard from reliable sources about college students who don’t know how to send a piece of mail. Meg is in high school.]

Facts and truth

Reading about Russian-textbook “history” made me recall this observation, from Robert Caro’s Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing (New York: Knopf, 2019):

While I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is.

Related posts
Barack Obama on facts : “Facts are stubborn things” : Longhand and a Smith-Corona : Taped to the lamp

Fact-free history

In The New York Times, an introduction to Vladimir Medinsky, Putin adviser and lead author of new history textbook for Russian high-school students:

“Facts by themselves don’t mean very much,” Mr. Medinsky wrote in one of his books. “Everything begins not with facts, but with interpretations. If you love your homeland, your people, then the story you write will always be positive.”

Impossible to think about what’s happening there without thinking about what’s happening here: Stalin was a wise leader; slaves developed skills. War is peace, &c.

A related post
Reporting the teacher

“A fairly precise notion of the book”

From the diary of Silas Flannery:


One instance of the “reading” that follows:

Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1981).

In the digital humanties, it’s now called distant reading. I’ll say it is.

Also from this novel
The formula : Novels and theories

Reporting the teacher

The Washington Post has a long article about Mary Wood, a South Carolina high-school English teacher who was reprimanded after two of her AP students reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her students selections from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.

The clips of residents calling for Wood to be “disciplined” or fired are chilling.

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What not to-do

From The Guardian :

Donald Trump has denied wrongdoing after a report on Monday said that one of the former president’s long-time assistants told federal investigators he repeatedly wrote to-do lists for her on documents from the White House marked classified.

The aide, Molly Michael, told investigators that more than once she got requests or tasks from Trump written on the back of notecards that she later recognized as sensitive White House materials, ABC News reported on Monday, citing sources.

As a longtime maker of to-do lists, mostly paper-based, I know that this is what not to-do. A scrap of paper, a fresh index card, or a page in a pocket planner is always a better choice than a classified document.

A related post
Ta-da

The rules

From a pre-school:

~ No hurts.

~ Be kind.

~ Have fun.

Useful for later life too.

[“No hurts,” as explained to me: “Keep your hands to yourself.”]