Recently updated
Chris and Mary Miller in Vanity Fair.
Orange Crate Art
Today’s Newsday Saturday
“Wicked group.”
Camembert
A sentence from Sodom and Gomorrah.
Orange Crate Art: Soup’s on
To the left, Nancy and Sluggo sup soup. To the right, Elaine and I do the same.
National Grammar Day
A day without grammar are without day grammar a.
Grammars galore
From the Grolier Club, an off- and online exhibition from the collection of Bryan Garner, Taming the Tongue: In the Heyday of English Grammar (1711–1851).
Yes, Michael, there was an Alfred
For anyone who learned to play guitar by way of Alfred’s Basic Guitar Method: yes, there was an Alfred. But it’s complicated.
A Tunes, for beginner violinists
Elaine Fine has a book of violin pieces out from Mel Bay, A Tunes: Capricious Pieces for Beginner Violinists.
“The Vermeers”
A sentence from Sodom and Gomorrah.
“As seen in Wal-Mart”
A customer, in her fifties at least, no mask, wearing a sweatshirt with this motto: I’M JUST WTF-ING MY WAY THROUGH LIFE
How to improve writing (no. 91)
Sometimes when I look at an old post, I wonder how I could have missed what now seems so obvious.
“Commensurate”?
If there’s a more pompous way to say it, Brian Williams will find it.
Recently updated
A resolution in the Illinois House to condemn Chris Miller.
“Effeminate”?
“He was a skinny high school student who had asthma, a high-pitched voice and effeminate mannerisms”: it’s a good story, in The New York Times. But isn’t characterizing someone’s way of being as “effeminate” part of the problem to begin with?
“A blue-grey bracelet of jetsam”
West London, the early 1960s. A boy who will grow up to write a book about sardines has a first encounter with the small oily fish.
Life and arts
A sentence from Sodom and Gomorrah.
Where have all the Chessmen gone?
I see a sun, a house, a plant, and a watering can. The cookies taste just fine, but where did the chess pieces go? And how can the cookies still be Chessmen?
Recently updated
Chris Miller’s truck.
H. Neil Matkin again, again
The worst college president in the country?
Today’s Newsday Saturday
“Throw back quickly.”
Recently updated
New developments in the story of Chris Miller’s truck.
Small pleasures
When I saw this oatmeal cookie, I thought dog. But it’s pretty clearly a bear.
At Smith College and elsewhere
The New York Times tells the story of an encounter in a Smith College dorm lounge, the campus history that preceded the encounter, and the aftermath.
#Sedition3PTruck
“Researchers on Twitter first noticed the Ford pickup truck with the far-right militia’s decal parked on the Capitol grounds in footage posted to social media and taken by CBS News.”
An on-screen jump-seat
From A Life of Her Own (dir. George Cukor, 1950).
Kudlick plumbing
An oddly placed spout.
Separated at birth
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Ernest Angley.
George Sanders and a Ticonderoga
In Witness to Murder (dir. Roy Rowland, 1954).
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021)
The poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti has died at the age of 101.
Dick Gallup (1942–2021)
With Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, and Ron Padgett, he belonged to what John Ashbery jokingly called “the soi-disant Tulsa School” of poetry.