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Words of the year Now with demure and kakistocracy.

An interview with Wyna Liu

From The Atlantic, an interview with Wyna Liu, editor of the New York Times puzzle Connections: “The Most Controversial Game on the Internet.” (Talk about hype). An excerpt, explaining the puzzle’s color categories:

Purple is the wordplay category. The four words in that group are not defined by their literal meanings. It’s words that end with ___ or homophones or something. Blue is trivia that is maybe a bit more specialized, not just definitions. Maybe it’s all movies or certain bands. Sometimes that’s the hardest one. Yellow and green are other category types: They might be four things you bring to the beach, or sometimes they’re all synonyms for the same word. I would say that yellow is the most straightforward.

Another way to define the purple category: it’s the words that are left over after you get the yellow, green, and blue.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Anna Stiga,” Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, using an alias that signals an easier Stumper of his making. Ehh, not that easy — half an hour for me, with the bottom half of the puzzle considerably more difficult than the top. The puzzle’s distinctive feature: two stacks of thirteen-, thirteen-, and fifteen-letter answers.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, six letters, “Talk related to ‘gargle.’” Etymologically? Maybe close, but I don’t think so. As slang? I have no idea.

3-D, five letters, “Name on the cover of I Dissent (2016).” And if only —

6-D, three letters, “Broth with tái lan.” I bet more solvers will be familiar with the broth than with this ingredient that can go with it.

14-A, thirteen letters, “The stripes of its American flag represent the Medicines of Life.” There are so many things I haven’t learned yet.

21-D, six letters, “Surname derived from oven operators.” A surprising factoid.

30-A, seven letters, “Prepares for sale, as related products.” Strange to see the present-tense verb.

31-D, eight letters, “Whom Du Bois called ‘scholar and knight.’” I don’t know how I pulled the name from my memory vault, but I did.

34-A, seven letters, “What John Appleseed promoted early on.” Read the clue carefully.

40-D, four letters, “Nickname with a despotic homonym.” Good Lord. This seems like an awful way to clue the nickname.

42-A, four letters, “Is aimless.” A verb looking odd on its own. 43-A, four letters, “Soil or schmo.” Ha!

46-A, five letters, “Nine-year-old on Swedish kronor.” Huh? What?

47-A, fifteen letters, “‘May I have more?’” My favorite of the long answers.

My favorite in this puzzle: 29-A, seven letters, “Stuffed street food.” Represent.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Separated at birth

Fresca at Noodletoon wrote a bit about George Caleb Bingham’s painting The Jolly Flatboat Men. I thought I’d seen it, but no, it’s in the National Gallery, and the painting I know is in the St. Louis Art Museum, with a different fiddler. The painting in St. Louis is Bingham’s Jolly Flatboatmen in Port, and I’ve had it in mind for years as a good item for a post, because the fiddler, to my eye, is John Hartford.

[Click either image for a larger view.]

I looked up John Hartford in the same old place and was both surprised and not surprised to find this detail:

He spent his childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was exposed to the influence that shaped much of his career and music: the Mississippi River. From the time he got his first job on the river, at age 16, Hartford was on, around, or singing about the river.

I think it’s unlikely that John Hartford did not know and love this painting.

Related reading
All OCA “separated at birth” posts (Pinboard)

[I found and cropped a photograph of John Hartford from his official Facebook page — no photographer credited. The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

A third law

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

If there was one law for the poor, who have neither money nor influence, and another law for the rich, who have both, there is still a third law for the public official with real power, who has more of both. After the Taylor Estate fight, Robert Moses must have known — he proved it by his actions — that he could, with far more impunity than any private citizen, defy the law. He gloried in the knowledge; he boasted and bragged about it. For the rest of his life, when a friend, an enemy — or one of his own lawyers — would protest that something he was doing or was proposing to do was illegal, Moses would throw back his head and say, with a broad grin, a touch of exaggeration and much more than a touch of bravado: “Nothing I have ever done has been tinged with legality.”

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)

[The Taylor Estate: property that Moses wanted, and got, for a state park.]

Talking about contingency

Calbert Graham (Stephen McKinley Henderson) in “From Russian Hill with Love,” an episode of the Netflix series A Man on the Inside (2024):

“Every great thing in your life, when you look back on it, feels like a miracle.”

If you watch, you’ll see that he’s talking about contingency.

A related post
Fluke life

[The eight-episode series is worth seeking out.]

Thanksgiving 1924

[“Jails and Hospitals Gay with Feasting: From Ludlow Street To Sing Sing Death House, Thanksgiving Is Celebrated.” The New York Times, November 28, 1924. Click for a larger view.]

Wikipedia provides some background:

The first book of crossword puzzles was published by Simon & Schuster in 1924, after a suggestion from co-founder Richard Simon’s aunt. The publisher was initially skeptical that the book would succeed, and only printed a small run at first. The book ... was an instant hit, leading crossword puzzles to become a craze of 1924.

Crosswords or no crosswords, Keiths or no Keiths, Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Nick Cave’s advice

Nick Cave offers advice to a thirteen-year-old correspondent asking how, in a world of hatred and disconnection, to live life to the fullest and not waste one’s potential. Cave’s reply begins: “Read.”

Wonderful stuff: read the full response.

See also Nick Cave’s explanation of the point in life.

A pocket notebook sighting

[From 13 West Street (dir. Philip Leacock, 1962. Click for a larger view.]

That’s Rod Steiger as Detective Sergeant Pete Koleski. Don’t mistake him for a contemptuous waiter.

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)

[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914–1916

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Private Notebooks 1914–1916. Edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff (New York: Liveright, 2022). xiv + 217 pages. $24.95.

Three notebooks survive of the six that Ludwig Wittgenstein kept during his time as an infantryman in the Great War. He enlisted, immediately and improbably, on August 7, 1914, leaving England to serve with the Austrian army on the war’s Eastern Front, operating a searchlight on a patrol ship, laboring in an artillery workshop, directing fire from an observation tower, and, later, seeing battle in Russia and Italy. All the while, he was writing in notebooks.

The recto pages of the three surviving notebooks, containing material that became the stuff of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, were published in German with English translation as Notebooks 1914–1916 (1961), with no indication that anything was omitted. The verso pages, written in a simple code (a = z ), were long unavailable in German or in translation, likely because of executors’ unease about Wittgenstein’s occasional references to masturbation, unnamed “sins,” and his love of David Pinsent, the Cambridge student who was the first of Wittgenstein’s three significant attachments. The verso pages — the private pages — appear in this volume in German and, for the first time, in English translation.

The title Private Notebooks promises much in the way of personal revelation. Wittgenstein writes (briefly) of his brother Paul, a pianist, losing his right arm in battle; of David Pinsent’s brother, killed in action; of joy in receiving letters from Pinsent (he kisses one). He writes repeatedly about his fellow soldiers as rowdies, ruffians, boorish “swine” who tease him unmercifully. He writes at greater length about his service as “a test of fire” and about his fear of death, wondering how he’ll behave when he’s fired upon, even as he acknowledges that he’s “intoxicated” by gunfire. He sees the fact of death as redemptive: “Only death gives life meaning”; “Perhaps the proximity of death will bring me the light of life!” But he desperately wants to live. He carries with him Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, calling it a talisman. He repeats to himself words from Tolstoy: “Man is helpless in the flesh but free in the spirit!” In a letter, he was to say that Tolstoy’s book kept him alive.

All through his military service, Wittgenstein is doing or trying to do what he calls his “work” — the work of philosophy. In quiet times, his duties become the setting for that work:

15.9.14.
I can think best right now when I am peeling potatoes. Always volunteer for it. It is for me what grinding lenses was for Spinoza.

Thus a paring knife, like a pen or pencil, becomes a tool of thinking.

Many of the entries are terse notations:

29.11.14.
Worked pretty hard.—.

3.12.14.
Didn’t work but experienced a great deal, but I’m too tired to write about it right now.—

25.12.14.
Ate dinner in the officers’ mess. Worked a little.

And there are long dry spells, with entry after entry beginning “Did no work,” as Wittgenstein seeks “the redeeming thought” that would pull his efforts together.

Marjorie Perloff, a major critic of modern and postmodern poetry, sees a breakthrough in the merging of recto and verso in the final surviving notebook:

As I was editing the notebooks, it occurred to me that the short Notebook 3 would make much more sense if I included some of the most striking and beautiful passages from the philosophical side (the recto); indeed, as I argue throughout, verso and recto, at first quite disconnected, gradually come together so that, by the end, they often correspond. This does not mean neat pairing of any sort, but a close and uncanny chronological correspondence between the left-hand and right-hand pages.

Perloff begins juxtaposing passages with Notebook 2. Here is one instance, with a recto passage (in italics) added between verso entries:

22.5.15.
Lovely letter from Russell!

23.5.15
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

24.5.15.
Made the acquaintance today of the old logician Dziewicki, whom Russell mentioned in his letter. A nice old man.

Perloff has chosen to interpolate a striking sentence that would find its way into the Tractatus (as 5.6), but I’m hard pressed to see a connection to the verso passages that frame it here.

Another example. The numbers in brackets refer to sections of the Tractatus:

24.7.16.
We’re being shelled. And at every shot my soul contracts. I would like so much to keep on living!

24.7.16.
The world and life are one. [5.621]

The physiological life is naturally not “life.” And neither is the psychological life. Life is the world.

Ethics does not deal with the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic.

Ethics and aesthetics are one. [See 6.421]

Here, too, it’s difficult to see anything “close and uncanny” between verso and recto. If anything, the two seem markedly distinct: a passionate plea to stay alive on one page, a series of abstract pronouncements on the other. I can imagine someone speaking these italicized passages and being met with a rejoinder: Hey! We’re being shelled!

But sometimes entries do jibe:

11.8.16.
I am living in sin, hence unhappy. I’m morose, joyless. I’m at strife with my entire company.

11.8.16
I can objectively confront every object. But not the “I.”

So there really is an art and method by which philosophy can and must come to terms with the “I” in a non-psychological sense. [Cf. 5.641]

Now that’s a provocative pairing.

And recto excerpts that prefigure the enigmatic final sections of the Tractatus seem to have baffled Wittgenstein himself:

6.7.16.
Colossal exertions this last month. Have thought a great deal about all sorts of things, but curiously enough cannot establish their connection to my mathematical train of thought.

The humanity on view in the Private Notebooks makes them worth reading, but if you haven’t read Wittgenstein, there are better places to start: The Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. I’d liken the Notebooks to a multiple-CD set with a recording session’s every false start, breakdown, and alternate take: for completists only.

Related reading
All OCA Wittgenstein posts (Pinboard)

[It’s not clear what Wittgenstein’s dashes signify. Perloff cites without further explanation a hypothesis that they represent forms of prayer. Russell: Bertrand Russell. Dziewicki: M.H. Dziewicki, a logician.]