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Along came Mary, and a bookstore Now with more about the Liveright Bookshop and the Liveright sisters.

HCR, August 11

The August 11 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American puts yesterday’s news in one place.

Like Mueller, She Wrote, Richardon suspects a Saudi connection:

What springs to mind for me is the plan pushed by Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and fundraiser and campaign advisor Tom Barrack, to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. In 2019, whistleblowers from the National Security Council worried that their efforts might have broken the law and that the effort to make the transfer was ongoing. The plan was to enable Saudi leaders to build nuclear power plants, a plan that would have yielded billions of dollars to the investors but would have allowed Saudi Arabia to build nuclear weapons.

If the defeated former president has no objection to unsealing the warrant and inventory for the search of his property (documents which he himself could have made available days ago), I can imagine three possible follow-ups. He might claim that evidence was planted. Or that a coffee-boy put something in a box without his knowledge. A heavily redacted inventory might allow him to claim that the Justice Department in fact has nothing on him. In 1930s movie-speak: “They’re tryin’a frame me, I tell ya!” Or: “You ain’t got nothin’ on me, see?”

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One more possible move: he might claim that he declassified materials in his head, or by telling someone that he had declassified them.


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My last guess seems to have been right. The defeated former president, forty-eight minutes ago on his faux-Twitter: “It was all declassified.”

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As The New York Times points out, even if it were declassified, that wouldn’t matter.

Dusk, dusk, “Dusk”

It occurred to me last night, around dusk, that dusk is a beautiful word. Where is it from? That’s uncertain. From Etymonline:

“partial darkness, state between light and darkness, twilight,” 1620s, from an earlier adjective dusk, from Middle English dosc (c. 1200) “obscure, not bright; tending to darkness, shadowy,” having more to do with color than light, which is of uncertain origin, not found in Old English. Middle English also had it as a verb, dusken “to become dark.” The Middle English noun was dusknesse “darkness” (late 14c.).

Perhaps it is from a Northumbrian variant of Old English dox “dark-haired, dark from the absence of light,” with transposition of -k- and -s- (compare colloquial ax for ask). But OED notes that “few of our words in -sk are of OE origin.” Old English dox is from PIE [Proto-Indo-European] *dus-ko- “dark-colored” (source also of Swedish duska “be misty,” Latin fuscus “dark,” Sanskrit dhusarah “dust-colored”; also compare Old English dosan “chestnut-brown,” Old Saxon dosan, Old High German tusin “pale yellow”).

“Dusk” is the title of a great 1940 Duke Ellington recording. Solos by Rex Stewart (cornet) and Lawrence Brown (trombone).

[The asterisk: “Words beginning with an asterisk are not attested in any written source.”]

Worse than I imagined, I think

From The Washington Post:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

Mueller, She Wrote (Allison Gill) has a thread that suggests a Trump–Saudi connection.

[I’m not sure what I imagined, but I think “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons” is worse. The “gift” link I first posted no longer goes to the right article, so I’ve replaced it with an ordinary link.]

Unsealed

Attorney General Merrick Garland has asked a court to unseal the warrant for the search of the defeated former president’s property and the inventory of what was taken from the property.

[Extra credit to the AG for not referring to the former president by name.]

“O tell me where is fancy bread?”

It is now Friday, June 17, 1904, sometime after midnight. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus make their way to a “cabman’s shelter,” a coffeehouse where Bloom aims to set Stephen right with a cup of coffee and something to eat. (As we will soon learn, Stephen hasn’t eaten since June 15.) Here’s a wonderful passage showing Bloom’s and Stephen’s utterly different responses to their surroundings. From the “Eumaeus” episode, written in the meandering, sleepy sentences one might be speaking in the wee small hours of a hard day’s night:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Four notes:

~ “Ibsen, associated with Baird’s”: an association established in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916):

as he went by Baird’s stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty.

Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated notes that Joyce changed the real-life D.G. Baird and J. Paul Todd’s engineering works to “the stonecutter’s” and cites Joyce’s essay “Ibsen’s New Drama” (1900), describing the wife of a sculptor in Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (1899):

Her airy freshness is as a breath of keen air. The sense of free, almost flamboyant, life, which is her chief note, counterbalances the austerity of Irene and the dullness of Rubek.

~James Rourke’s city bakery: a real Dublin bakery.

~ The faithful Achates, “fidus Achates,” is Aeneas’s companion in the Aeneid.

~ “O tell me where is fancy bread”: a play on Shakespeare.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

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How to improve writing (no. 104) Now with more improvement.

A petard

From The Washington Post:

If Trump is found to have violated federal law in removing and retaining classified documents without authorization, he could be convicted of a felony punishable by five years in prison. And that conviction would be a felony carrying that punishment because of a law signed by President Donald Trump.

A nice way to illustrate the idea of poetic justice. Also the idea of being hoist with one’s own petard.

[Hoist? The past participle of hoise.]

How to improve writing (no. 104)

From a Washington Post article, describing the efforts of a defeated former president’s supporters:

One man stood on the bridge, which crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, holding the American flag upside down — widely recognized as a symbol of his belief that the country is in distress.

I tried this sentence on a volunteer, who immediately noticed a problem: an inverted flag is not widely recognized as a symbol of that man’s belief. Better:

One man stood on the bridge, which crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, holding the American flag upside down — widely recognized as symbol of the belief that the country is in distress.

A larger problem: an inverted flag is not a symbol of anyone’s belief. Like a motorist’s flare or a traffic light or an S-O-S, it’s a signal. And the signal need not apply to nationwide distress. From 4 U.S. Code §8: “The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.”

So better still:

One man stood on the bridge, which crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, holding an inverted American flag, widely recognized as a signal of distress or danger.

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August 11: I still have this sentence kicking around in my head. And I wondered this morning, why “the bridge, which”? There’s no previous sentence that identifies the bridge. So how about

One man stood on the bridge that crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, holding an inverted American flag, widely recognized as a signal of distress or danger.

Or clearer:

Standing on the bridge that crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, a man held an inverted American flag, widely recognized as a signal of distress or danger.

I flew a (virtual) inverted flag for different reasons in a 2019 blog post. I’m pretty sure that I learned about the inverted flag from the Canned Heat album Future Blues.

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

[I wouldn’t argue that “inverted” is better than “upside down,” but to my ear, it’s more graceful. This post is no. 104 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Raymond Briggs (1934–2022)

Writer and illustrator of The Snowman (1978), among many other books. I can also recommend Ethel & Ernest: A True Story (1999). The New York Times has an obituary.

My children always waited for the moment I would cry whenever we watched the animated adaptation of The Snowman.