John Crowley's Blog, page 21

Uneeda Pun

I hate smudgy eyeglasses.  Clean them by running them under hot water a long time (the optician says it can't deform the lenses), no scrubbing,  and wipe with clean cloth (diapers once perfect for this.)  But I found a tiny bottle of eyeglass cleaner in the back of the medicine cabinet that must have been a free sample.  The name of this fine (I tried it) product is "OptiMist."  This is beautiful.  You are an optimist if you see the future as good; your opti-aids are made to see well with a misting  of cleanser.  The two "opti"s have entirely different roots.

I love this kind of delicate beauty in brand names and slogans, unnecessary and probably unnoticed by many users.  It was the kind of thing that entranced me as a child.  I may have written here about my delight in the Mortons salt box when I was young:  the salt had some sort of additive that kept it from clumping in humid weather, and on the box was a pretty girl my age, with the box under her arm -- it had opened somehow and spilled a cascade of salt behind her that she didn't notice.  Slanting lines representing falling rain came toward her open umbrella, and (in the older versions, I seem to remember this) made circles in the puddles at her feet.  The slogan written beside her was, as of course you know, "When It Rains, It Pours."  I pondered this at length, tickled by the way the "it" had two different meanings.  I was a little in love with the insouciant girl.

Cruder but hilarious in its crudity was the name of a brand of crackers we didn't buy, that I saw only at the market:  Uneeda, a word resembling popular American Indian names for food products (e.g. Oneida), but revealing its actual source when coupled with the name of the food:  Uneeda Biscuit.  

There were lots of these -- I think fewer now, though maybe Internet startups like them.  Anybody remember others?

Formerly impossible grammar whiz

Many witty and clever responses to than in that in.   was foir  anselmo_b was first off the mark, but I think the prize ought to go to  dyvyd for his elegant one:  "I'd rather be seen naked than in that in public."

The original (Sis tells me) is from Adam Smith, and looks more puzzling in an 18th c. paragraph:

When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty; we enter into all the surprise and admiration which it naturally excites in him, but which it is no longer capable of exciting in us; we consider all the ideas which it presents rather in the light in which they appear to him, than in that in which they appear to us, and we are amused in sympathy with his amusement which thus enlivens our own. 
 
Of course we wouldn't  do that  now (my unnecessary hint was to be "18th c. prose") -- we'd repeat the noun:  "than in the light in which".  Latinate, I guess.

Impossible grammar whiz

Try this one, submitted by correspondent Nora Milller (my sister):

 than in that in 

I will give a hint if necessary.  Of course I (and she) may be wrong and an easy solution will propose itself to somebody.

Franzenism

I haven't read the book (or the included essays) myself, but in the TLS review of Jonathan Franzen's new non-fiction collection there is a weird notion quoted:

"In an uptight essay entitled 'Comma-Then', he announces that one of the best reasons a writer can give him to 'put a book down and not pick it up again... is to use the word then as a conjunction without a subject following it."

I too can be offended by small things like that, but the extravagance of the reaction aside, what exactly does he mean?  A sentence like "He killed it, gutted it, skinned it, and then cooked it for dinner"?  It should be "then he cooked it"?  I think my own writing is pervaded by this purported atrocity, though the usage is a little hard to look for.

Deals and shops

The winner of the last Grammar Whiz (entries now closed) is  nmtucson with the following entry:

"A letter has been sent out to companies named in a large merger involving several stores in the Boston area. The advertising letter informed partners in the deal and shops of a sale on commercial furniture."

This gets close but is not as simple as the original, which many have now discovered is in a sentence about taxes in a recent Economist magazine.  "[T]axes obstruct some mutually beneficial exchanges.  These lost purchases deprive customers of a deal and shops of a sale, without raising any money for the government."  It seemed likely to me that someone would discern the necessity of a parallel construction, as nmtucson almost but not quite did.  

New Grammar Whiz

The rules are as usual:  Add words to the beginning or the end of this phrase to make a complete and grammatical English sentence.  No sticking new punctuation into the phrase.  As usual, I expect this to be solved in the five minutes after I post.  Here it is:

deal and shops of a sale

It occurs to me that the problem could be solved by simply googling the phrase.  The original would probably popup instantly.  What a world.

Again!

Someone at the NYTimes is losing his/her grip on the grammar.  Picture caption:

 Lukas Wartman, a leukemia doctor and researcher, developed the disease himself. Facing death, his colleagues sequenced his cancer genome. The result was a totally unexpected treatment.

he story itself is like a medical novel, but true:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/health/in-gene-sequencing-treatment-for-leukemia-glimpses-of-the-future.html?emc=na

Higg-ledy Piggledy

From today's Times:  

Confirmation of the Higgs boson or something very much like it would constitute a rendezvous with destiny for a generation of physicists who have believed in the boson for half a century without ever seeing it. The finding affirms a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws — but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry.

Twenty years ago, no, more, I conceived of a story in which a physicist confirms the Gnostic vision of reality in studying symmetry and the break in symmetry.  In the Gnostic mythos the Pleroma of perfect unity is broken by a movement within it -- usually attributed to the desire of Sophia to become closer to the First Light -- and this movement shatters the original perfection; Sophia is ejected, and her fall from the Pleroma is the cause of everything that comes to be, including matter.  Of course for the Gnostics, beings like Sophia and the Archons were not persons, they were hypostases -- allegories of metaphysical (now seen as physical) states and changes.

How did they know?  

Amazing

I have certainly never had a tribute like this one.  I do worry what she'll do if she ever finds a book she likes better.  But I guess that's a problem all tattoo-o-philes must reconcile themselves to.  I am deeply honored.



Here is her blog, with the story:

http://www.mobiusengine.co.uk/snippetygiblets/?p=12 

Please submit your own pictures of body parts inscribed with my texts.  There will be prizes.  No faux tattoos please.

Echt Pulp

There are almost no pulp adventure/mystery magazines left out of the dozens, maybe hundreds (ask Paul DiFilippo) there once were.  So if you have ambitions in that line you have to be very good at doing the sort of thing done there.  David Gates, old chum of mine, often a commenter here,has established himself as one of these, writing true noir (and Western noir!) stories for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery magazine and Ellery Queen and others.  They are good.  Like some --  but not many -- of the old pulp writers Gates is also a fine stylist, master of the -- what shall we call it?  -- American plain ornate? I'll just call it near perfect of its kind, without affectation or a hint of campy knowingness:  the real thing. His Western bounty-hunter is named Placido Geist, and that name will give you a measure of the man by itself. Those tales are to be collected in a volume, and he also has a spy novel in the works  Link to his new Web page with free content to the left.