E.M. Forster on books on Frasier

From E.M. Forster, “A Book that Influenced Me,” collected in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951):

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

I spotted a few words of this sentence on the band that runs across the bookshelves of Niles Crane’s library.

[“Sharing Kirby,” November 20, 2001. Click for a larger view.]

That’s Kirby Gardner (Brian Klugman) on the ladder, son of onetime high-school goddess and Frasier crush Lana Gardner, née Lynley (Jean Smart).

No disrespect to the actor, but I think Frasier jumped at least a baby shark with the introduction of Kirby. Here he’s rearranging Niles’s library, pausing now and then to read and eat Cheetos. (Don’t worry: he’s wearing gloves.) Why is Kirby working for Niles? Because Frasier, claiming to feel guilty about not getting Kirby an internship at KACL, has talked Niles into hiring the lad. In truth Frasier is getting revenge for Niles’s not sharing a rare wine find. Kirby is no prize:

Kirby: I fudged a little bit on my job history.

Frasier: So you never actually worked at NASA.

Kirby : Or Burger King!

The book that influenced Forster: Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.

[Lots of English majors in those writers’ rooms.]

Domestic comedy

“Is it raining on the phone, or outside?”

“On the phone.”

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Welcome to Illinois

[As seen at a rest area recently.]

Yeah, not a great look for a state.

Pareidolia

[Click for larger fruit.]

A distant relation of Mac? It’s not saying.

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Madeline Kripke’s dictionaries

“We don’t really know how many books it is”: Atlas Obscura visits Madeline Kripke’s dictionary collection, now housed at Indiana University. The Kripke collection may be the largest collection of dictionaries ever amassed.

A must-see: two pages from Dobie Gillis: Teenage Slanguage Dictionary.

Recently updated

Words of the year Now with hallucinate and Matilda.

A “Now and Then” surprise

[Click for a larger view.]

A surprise: liner notes inside the sleeve, by the music writer John Harris. They explain, among other things, what’s up with the assemblage on the back cover. It’s the work of an American artist, Chris Giffin, purchased by George Harrison in 1997. Harris writes that Olivia Harrison “recently decided to have a closer look at it”:

“I put it on the mantlepiece,” she says. “Then the phone rang. It’s Paul, and he begins to remind me of this third song with Real Love and Free as a Bird. I said, ‘I remember it.’ He said, ‘It’s called Now and Then.’ I’m standing there with the phone in one hand, looking at the clock that said Now and Then. I was sort of dumbfounded. I said, ‘I think this is George saying it’s OK.’”

Here, from Oregon Art Beat, is a 2010 feature about Chris Giffin and her art. There are many clocks.

“My terrible predicament”

Riding in a carriage, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor tells Jenny Petherbridge that God has made him a liar:

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936).

Dr. O’Connor (an unlicensed gynecologist) is the novel’s great talker, a man who knows he should have been born a woman (we would call him trans), a teller of his own troubles, a confessor to his friends, a philosopher of the night. This recounted reconciliation of father and son is the only moment of human reconciliation in Nightwood. And as so often happens in the novel, one character is talking past one another: “Jenny had shrunk into her rug and was not listening.”

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5 Patchin Place : Smith going backward

[It doesn’t matter if the doctor said what he said to his father only to comfort him: it’s still a moment of reconciliation.]

Screensavers, lost

I was disappointed to discover today that Yuji Adachi’s Fliqlo screensaver, which turns the screen into a flip clock, no longer works in macOS Sonoma. The Fliqlo website mentions a bug in Sonoma’s screensaver engine.

So I decided to renew my acquaintance with Simon Hey’s Word Clock screensaver, which works — but now uses an inordinate amount of memory. For the first time in ages, I could hear the MacBook Air fan firing up as the screensaver ran. The Activity Monitor showed Word Clock using close to 1GB of RAM.

I then tried two humble built-in screensavers, Drift and Hello, and with each, the fan fired up. I shouldn’t have been surprised: online discussions report enormous amounts of memory use with so-called legacy screensavers. The Apple screensavers named for versions of macOS (Sonoma, Ventura, Monterey) seem to work without problems, but the swirling colors aren’t to my taste. And I wouldn’t dare try one of Sonoma’s new video screensavers.

The simple though unhappy fix, at least for me, is to skip using any screensaver, at least until a Sonoma update fixes the engine trouble.

“I adore ice-cream”

Still in a villa on the Mediterranean. The mysterious caller has identified himself as Mr. Walter Prodger, an American friend of mother’s late husband. Miss Anderson, mother’s companion, has joined mother, daughter Milly, and Mr. Prodger for lunch. Milly has announced that she’d like to go to America — “awfully.”

Katherine Mansfield, “The Doves’ Nest” (1923).

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