[Insert obligatory joke about turning back time here]

““It’s a dying art — there are fewer people around today who know what to do with these things”: Marvin Schneider, clock master to New York City.

[Standard time returns at 2:00 a.m. Sunday.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Erik Agard, looked impossible to me. After fifteen minutes or so, I had a grand total of six answers filled in before a plausible answer to 4-Down, eight letters, “Soy protein, in some recipes,” popped into my head. And that answer opened up the puzzle.

Four clues that I especially liked, all with ten-letter answers: 1-Down, “Blood-chilling locales.” 2-Down, “Workplaces with score keepers.” 28-Down, “Line between pants.” 29-Down, “American family structure.”

And one more: 11-Down, six letters, “__ Four (Monkees nickname).”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Proust on sentences

I just rediscovered this passage in an eleven-year-old e-mail to Andrew Sullivan. The subject was postmodernism and long sentences. Why did I never think of posting the passage here? Oh — now I have.


Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002).

A highlight of my OCA life: back in his blogging days, Andrew once made a post with a link to a post of mine. (I had sent him the link.) It was astonishing to see the number of visits to that post rise.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Not all long sentences are deserving of a reader’s struggle. Proust’s are.]

Hedges

[Zits, November 2, 2018. Click for a larger view.]

Kinda, sorta, and so on: in linguistics they’re called hedges. They can be used to manipulate pragmatic halos, I think. Yes, that was a hedge, of a joking sort.

Jeremy’s enjoyed-ish marks a new direction in hedged assertions, IMHO.

The End of the Evening

A board game by the poet Kenneth Koch, The End of the Evening.

Related reading
All OCA Kenneth Koch posts (Pinboard)

積ん読, Berlin

Much taken with Jason Lutes’s graphic novel Jar of Fools (2003), I bought the first volume of Lutes’s trilogy Berlin when it appeared in 2004. I put it on a shelf, thinking I’d wait for the other volumes. Years passed. I’d check Amazon every so often. The second volume of Berlin appeared in 2008. In 2009 I found out, bought a copy, and put it on a shelf. Years passed. And now the third volume has appeared. It’s time to read Berlin. I’m five chapters into the first volume, with the other two stacked on the floor. And it’s lucky that I waited: reading Stefan Zweig over the last two years has given me a much better sense of Weimar Germany than I would have had in 2004. And having read Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, I can see right away that novel’s influence on Lutes’s storytelling (montage, quick shifts in perspective).

積ん読 [tsundoku]: “the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with such other unread books.”

[All three volumes of Berlin are also now available as a single hardcover volume.]

“Only those regions”

Franz Kafka, Letter to the Father, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1966).

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

FilmStruck recommendations

New York Times editors and reporters have suggested twelve movies to watch before FilmStruck disppears. I’ve seen three (and heard of only two of the others). I have some viewing to do.

Santayana Zerbina

[Zippy, October 31, 2018.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy and Zerbina have (again) been transformed into 1950s romance-comics characters. “It’s not so bad, Zippy!” says Zerbina. “Maybe we’ll be happier living our lives in th’ 1950s!” Zippy isn’t so sure.

Like Zerbina, I have the George Santayana aphorism in my head in the form of learn from and doomed. But what Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

A 1950s pumpkin

[“Alger Hiss at Princeton.” Photograph by Ralph Morse. N.d. From the Life Photo Archive.]

I went looking for a pumpkin last night and found this photograph. The description “Alger Hiss at Princeton” baffled me.

The Life feature “A Look at the World’s Week” (May 7, 1956) reported Alger Hiss’s visit to Princeton University, where he spoke before the American Whig-Cliosophic Society. (Which still exists.) From Life: “There was opposition to his appearance and paper pumpkins were strewn around the campus.” And then I remembered a little history.

[The Life Photo Archive seems unsearchable this morning.]