New directions in sardines

I opened a can of skinless and boneless sardines for lunch. In olive oil. Sliced a onion. Made a little lump of Dijon mustard. Took out some bread. And then I thought: what about barbecue sauce?

We have a bottle of Memphis-style sauce, nearly empty, in the fridge. Elaine, encouraging, not warning: “Try just a dab.” I did. Many dabs followed. Many, many dabs.

Sardines and barbecue sauce are out of sight: delicious and no longer visible. I am a member of the Clean Plate Club, and I owe it all to sardines and barbecue sauce. As they used to say on television, Try some today.

Related posts
Alex Katz, painter, eater Sardines for lunch, every day
City for Conquest (and sardines)
End of the U.S. sardine industry
Go fish

[Matt, this could be the recipe you’re looking for.]

What’s relatable

Ira Glass gave teachers of lit an odd little gift with his fleetingly infamous comment that King Lear is “not relatable.” Oh yeah? When I teach the play later this spring, I’ll probably invite my students to bash that piñata argue against that point of view. I will first have to explain who Ira Glass is: This American Life, as I already know, is off my students’ radar.

Looking up Glass’s comment now, I found a terrific response by Rebecca Mead, The Scourge of “Relatability” (The New Yorker). It might be generally useful to teachers who want to resist the idea that a work of lit must somehow meet a reader on the reader’s own terms. An excerpt:

To appreciate King Lear — or even The Catcher in the Rye or The Fault in Our Stars — only to the extent that the work functions as one’s mirror would make for a hopelessly reductive experience. But to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize — because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy — is our own failure. It’s a failure that has been dispiritingly sanctioned by the rise of “relatable.” In creating a new word and embracing its self-involved implications, we have circumscribed our own critical capacities. That’s what sucks, not Shakespeare.

Amen to that.

[“Later this spring”: as in spring semester. I’ve substituted italics for quotation marks in the excerpt.]

Domestic comedy

“What a crock of . . . baloney. Wait: can baloney come in crocks?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Spartz / Bentham

Emerson Spartz, “Internet-media entrepreneur,” as quoted in The New Yorker :

“People have hoity-toity reasons for preferring one kind of entertainment to another,” he said later. “To me, it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at cat photos that inspire you or so-called ‘high art’ that inspires you.”

And Jeremy Bentham, philosopher of utilitarianism:

Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few.

And everybody can play at clicking: 17 Secrets, 8 Crazy Ways, 3 Little Words. One difference between Spatz and Bentham is that Bentham wasn’t thinking of making money from distraction.

One more choice Spartz bit:

Asked to name the most beautiful prose he had read, he said, “A beautiful book? I don’t even know what that means. Impactful, sure.”

[Bentham’s famous words appear in The Rationale of Reward (1830).]

Marginalia

“Marginalia are on the march”: and on display.

Related posts
The fate of marginalia
From the Doyle edition (How many words can fit on a page of Four Quartets?)
Note-taking at Harvard (With a Jim Doyle story)

Horizon Bookstore bookmark

The Horizon Bookstore had at least three homes in Urbana, Illinois, before disappearing — which happened sometime in the 1990s, I think. When its South Goodwin home and adjacent buildings were razed to make way for a University of Illinois Chemical and Life Sciences Laboratory, the bookstore moved to a second-story location on West Oregon Street. By 1996 the Horizon was on South Wright Street, with fewer and fewer books.

The South Goodwin store was very much an academic bookstore, something like a tiny downstate version of the Seminary Co-op: lots of university press books, and as I remember it, lots of “theory,” with austere covers and never no photographs. And the Horizon could order anything. Who else would have ordered Nelson Goodman books for me? Well, the Seminary Co-op, but I didn’t yet know about the Seminary Co-op. The West Oregon location had more small-press books and zines. (Remember zines?) I remember many children’s books at the South Wright location and not much else.

The discoloration on this bookmark — tucked into a Nelson Goodman book — is not a matter of sun damage. The top of the bookmark is in fine shape. The yellowing just below the top and down the edge is the work of paper eating paper. There is no permanence.

Elaine and I took count last night: since moving to downstate Illinois in 1985, we have seen twelve bookstores disappear. That’s not including Borders and Waldenbooks. There is no permanence.

Other bookstores, other bookmarks
Gotham Book Mart
Paperback Booksmith
Strand Book Store

Toward or towards

From Bryan Garner’s LawProse blog: is it toward or towards? Short answer: in American English, toward. In British English, towards.

Fun, fun, fun

The greatest Downfall spoof of all time: Hitler learns about the Rolling Stone Greatest Albums List.

Thanks, Van Dyke!

Staedtler Norica pencil review

I am a hungry guppy, or just a guy with low morals. The invitation to write a review and get a $5 coupon from Staples was one I could not pass up. An added bit of incentive — write at least 400 characters and get “community points” (huh?) — felt like extra credit. I wrote about the Staedtler Norica pencil:

The Staedtler Norica pencil is a pleasure to write with. Its lead is like the woods in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: “lovely, dark and deep.” The Norica writes well, holds a point well, and sharpens easily (because the lead is centered in the wood). The eraser erases cleanly and decisively. I am not entirely sold on the pencil’s design: I’d prefer a painted ferrule. But the combination of black, white, and silver is pleasing, and the pencil is well finished. The price makes the Norica a great value in pencildom. Stock up!

The Norica is indeed a fine pencil. I bought a 36-pack months ago and used just a pencil or two now and then. Then I read a paean by father-son pencileers and thought I should give the Norica a chance. And soon I bought another 36-pack. I’m using Noricas to grade my students’ writing this semester. These pencils make the work more pleasant.

About “community points”: I realized, too late, that they will never turn into money. And that to get my $5 off, I will have to buy $50 worth of stuff. I take back my previous self-characterizations: I’m a gullible pup. And I’ve never much liked extra credit anyway.

[Pencileer is Sean’s coinage.]

How to improve writing (no. 53)

“. . . publically showcase the work that they are doing.”

I hear the ghost of William Strunk Jr.: “Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!” And needless variants. The adverb is publicly. (Garner’s Modern American Usage and Merriam-Webster will confirm that.) A public showcase? A showcase is by definition open to some audience. But showcase is a tired word, too redolent of The Price Is Right. And “the work that they are doing”? Much better:

“. . . present their work.”

From eight words to three, from thirteen syllables to four. If sentences are, as Richard Lanham says, attention economies, they must respect a reader’s time and intelligence. Revision is courtesy.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 53 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]