Finally hitting zero here overnight. A good cold-weather line from Douglas Stewart’s The Fire on the Snow, a 1941 radio play in verse about Sir Robert F. Scott’s ill-fated mission to the South Pole: The world is spun between two giant hands of ice.
Perhaps related: Pynchon, from Gravity’s Rainbow (n.b.: attempted years ago, didn’t even make it to halfway): Earth has turned over in its sleep, and the tropics are reversed…
Brian Setzer recently put out a record called Wolfgang’s Big Night Out, consisting of famous classical music pieces arranged for his rock n’ roll swing band. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not such a record is a wise idea, I remain impressed by several of the adapted song titles he came up with:
Even cleverer: The following titles of songs by Beatallica, the pseudo-tribute band that plays ingenious, surreal musical/lyrical mash-ups of Metallica and the Beatles:
Re office life: From Tom Stoppard’s 1976 play Dirty Linen:
May I be the first to welcome you to Room 3b. You will find the working conditions primitive, the hours antisocial, the amenities non-existent and the catering beneath contempt. On top of that the people are for the most part very very boring, with interests either so generalized as to mimic wholesale ignorance or so particular as to be lunatic obsessions. Their level of conversation would pass without comment in the lavatory of a mixed comprehensive and the lavatories, by the way, are few and far between.
We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours. Last week I burn through Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris’s poignantly comic novel of modern office life. I can wholeheartedly recommend the first third of it.
From the Department of Aquatic Ennui: The sign on the membership desk at the Y this morning: The pool is closed until further notice due to a lack of clarity.
It is only a week or two ago that I fully register the presence of this impossibly awesome line illustration in Teddy Newton’s end titles for The Incredibles — the five family members expressed in a handful of insouciant brushstrokes, as mere glyphs:
Brings to mind Design Observer‘s Jessica Helfand’s observation distinguishing The Incredibles from The Polar Express: the latter film may feature a pioneering use of “performance capture”, but The Incredibles demonstrates the art of design capture.
Roethke as web designer: The inexorable sadness of pixels?
Maybe instead of dreaming of shelling out three or four figures for a bottle of Montrachet, I should just buy Fountain’s Montrachet font.
My favorite quote from The Shakespeare Miscellany, by the way, is Auden’s sublimely pithy remark on Hamlet: Be suspicious of people who want to play this part.
Another intersection of names and typography: In The Shakespeare Miscellany, David and Ben Crystal mention an intriguing theory that proposes that our spelling of Shakespeare’s name is a bastardization caused by an old typesetting workaround. In the very few examples of Shakespeare’s signature that exist, he uses no “e” after the “k”; he spells it Shakspeare or something similar, as much as can be deciphered from his scrawl. And indeed many Elizabethan writings and documents refer to him as Shakspeare (among a raft of other variant spellings, among them Shakespheare, Shackespeare, Shakesper, Shaxberd, and, on his marriage bond, Shagspere).
Anyway, the theory suggests that early in “Shakspeare”’s career, when his name was beginning to appear in print, Elizabethan printers started taking the liberty of inserting an “e” (to form Shakespeare), and/or a hyphen (to form Shak-speare or
Fig. 1. My kingdom for a “ks” ligature!
And, so the story goes, over the years the “e” stuck, though the hyphen eventually fell out of use. And this ostensible printshop workaround has thus eclipsed not only the other spellings but perhaps the man’s actual name. “We have the printers to thank, it seems, for the name that has come down to us,” write the Crystals.
Not sure I entirely buy this theory, but it has a certain romantic font-geek charm.
Last Thursday night we see Regina Spektor perform at Kool Haus in Toronto. You know what I like about Regina Spektor? I like her logo.
RESPEKT! Also RESPEKTOR. Also, memo/email-style, RE: SPEKT, RE: SPEKTOR, and RE: GINA SPEKTOR. (Plus: She’s Russian-born, so the Cyrillic-ish K in RESPEKT is a nicely appropriate touch.) We should all be so lucky as to have a name like that, that can be so cleverly shortened and manipulated to such excellent typographical effect.
One or two of you may recall that I used the following quote as an epigraph on scottdavidherman.com for several years, which quote I found unceasingly hilarious (and still do, even though geographically it doesn’t apply to me anymore):
When you die and go to heaven, everyone who ever lived will be walking around having cocktails and hors d’oeuvres and introducing themselves, and when they say, “Oh, what time period are you from?” and you say, “Early-twenty-first-century America,” everyone will laugh.
It comes from Esquire‘s “365 Reasons to Kill Yourself”, circa early 2001. The piece seemed to vanish from the Esquire website for a while, but today I see that it has returned, here, though the formatting is all fucked up and for some reason the list stops at number 254. But what surprises me today is that there’s now a byline — and it’s Shalom Auslander. Really? He’s the one who wrote that? Not bad at all…
Correction: It’s not really a cold snap. A cold snap implies a cold that is unusual, unseasonable, and brief. Synonyms would be cold spell or cold wave. This cold, however, is absolutely seasonable, and it is here to stay. It has moved in. It’s not going anywhere for the next five or six months. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
I wonder how long it would take you to notice the regular recurrence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth. What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and nights? You could say, “it’s cold again; it was cold before,” but you couldn’t make the key connection and say, “it was cold this time last year,” because the notion of “year” is precisely the one you lack. Assuming that you hadn’t yet noticed any orderly progression of heavenly bodies, how long would you have to live on earth before you could feel with any assurance that any one particular long period of cold would, in fact, end?
Cold snap. Or, as the tune goes: It’s beginning to feel a lot like Canada. This morning I wake up feeling like something stored in a meat locker and so in my first few minutes of consciousness I manage to switch the heat on for the first time of the season. The furnace in the basement (I assume it’s in the basement, aren’t all furnaces in the basement?) magisterially stirs itself awake after months of idleness. For the first half hour the familiar gentle scent of burnt dust drifts down out of the vents. It is either the scent of burnt dust or the phrase burnt dust itself that tends to remind me of the bright dust that Mark Strand imagines in the Third Day stanza of his “Seven Days”:
I sat in a beach chair surrounded by tall grass
so that only the top of my hat showed.
The sky kept shifting but the sunlight stayed.
It was a glass pillar filled with bright dust, and you were inside.
Many months
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I’m Scott David Herman, I’m an American living in Canada, and I’ve been running erasing.org since 1999.
The expatriate life is very glamorous. I live and work on the fifth floor of a mid-rise glass-and-concrete ant farm situated in the abandoned ruins of downtown Hamilton, that legendary city many call the most beautiful smoke-spewing slag heap in all of Southern Ontario.
I enjoy staring into open books, mentally rotating Shakespeare’s skeleton, stacking objects in my quote-unquote office, and chopping at the Parnassian permafrost in the company of my wife Laura.
You can email me at scott at erasing.org.