Miskatonic University Press | William Denton

Time 2021-11-11 21:06:12

Web Name: Miskatonic University Press | William Denton

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Miskatonic University Press

Jerry Lewis Live on the Champs Elysees

25 October 2021 vagaries

Of the many, many, many excellent pieces on SCTV, “Jerry Lewis Live on the Champs Elysees” is one of the best. “Lewis is back, and France has got him!”

Inexplicably Martin Short as Jerry Lewis suddenly appears in a boy’s sailor uniform midway through a harangue:

And the point is, they’re terrified of a perfectionist! And if a Jerry Lewis ain’t gonna get a distribution deal, because of some ferkakte twelve-year-old with the pimples on his face, who’s head of the studio—this week—who doesn’t know from Hardly Working or The Errand Boy or Cinderfella, who only knows from Eva Braun with the big fahoyvens or the airplane smashing into the thing. Where are you, the public, expected to find the love, and the caring, and the feeling, and the good, and the nice? And even if you did, it wouldn’t be the good kind, because of the difference caused by the earlier thing.

Absolute genius.

(I can’t not point out it should be “Champs-Élysées,” and Martin Scorsese’s name is misspelled. Having Scorsese direct is a beautiful touch.)

Might as well be Canadian

08 October 2021 literature quotes

From John Clute’s A portrait of the burn of the world, a review of William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties:

There are several occupants of the previous books: Rydell, a man so incapable of protagonist moves of a generic sort he might as well be Canadian; Rei Toei, the Idoru herself, the hologrammatic artifact composed of information, growing denser by the second; Chevette and Fontaine from the first book; and others.

A man so incapable of protagonist moves of a generic sort he might as well be Canadian. Damn, that’s cold.

(See also Clute’s entry on William Gibson in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.)

Stony Lake Sounds

01 October 2021 field.recordings stony.lake

This summer I had a short piece called “Stony Lake Sounds” in The Islander, the annual publication of the Association of Ston(e)y Lake Cottagers. Many thanks to the editor, Kate Bonnycastle, for being interested!

Stony Lake Sounds has field recordings and links to accompany it. A free two-hour recording of a July 2020 dawn chorus is available for download!

(My apologies for the right-hand side being cut off. The pages are little wider than my scanner handles.)

Bill Arney dead

30 September 2021 literature

I was sorry to read on Don Herron’s site that Bill Arney has died. I mentioned him last year: he lived in Dashiell Hammett’s old apartment at 891 Post St. in San Francisco, where Hammett lived when he wrote The Maltese Falcon. In 2008 I took Don’s Hammett walking tour, and Arney let us come up so I could see the place. I was thinking about it again a couple of weeks ago when I watched John Huston’s film version again.

Overheard: The next thing

28 September 2021 quotes

Overheard while out walking, spoken by two young women who were going the other way:

“I missed it when it was popular, and now it’s super-popular.”

“It was best ten years ago.”

“Now I don’t know what the next thing is.”

Custom GNOME launchers

26 September 2021 unix

I learned something useful about GNOME recently: how to add my own launchers. I’m running Ubuntu on a ThinkPad that has a Windows key that Linux and Unix people call a Super key. When I tap Super, it calls up the activities overview, where I can search applications, settings, files, Unicode characters, or other things. Here’s what it looks like if I search for fi:

Firefox and Files make sense. Not only do I not know why Remmina showed, this is the first time I’ve heard of it. Could be useful, though.

Now, the two applications I use most frequently but run from downloaded tarballs, not as proper packages, are Zotero and the Tor browser. They’re set up in /usr/local/src/, and I have aliases in place so it’s easy to start them running with one command in a shell.

Both come with .desktop files that I can move to my desktop and use as launchers, but it’s much nicer to be able to hit Super-letter-letter-letter-RET and fire up what I want. I can do that for gPodder, for example. Super-g-p-o-RET and it launches.

Turns out if I put the .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/ then GNOME will see it and it becomes launchable. I had to tweak file paths for both, but now they work nicely. The Zotero one looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]Name=ZoteroExec=bash -c "/usr/local/src/zotero/Zotero_linux-x86_64/zotero -url %U"Icon=/usr/local/src/zotero/Zotero_linux-x86_64/chrome/icons/default/default256.pngType=ApplicationTerminal=false

Super-z-o-RET and it launches.

I made one so I can pop up an expense spreadsheet I use regularly. Here LibreOffice points directly to a particular file.

[Desktop Entry]Name=ExpensesExec=bash -c "libreoffice ~/finance/expenses.ods"Icon=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/mimetypes/libreoffice-oasis-spreadsheet.pngType=Application

It looks like this in the activities overview:

There’s more about this in the offical Desktop Entry Specification but really as long as you have three or four lines it’ll work.

World of Wonders

24 September 2021 literature

I’ve admired Robertson Davies and his three trilogies (Salterton, Deptford and Cornish) for decades. He is very old-fashioned now, but it was the same when he was alive. He was an Edwardian figure when I saw him strolling down Harbord Street in the late eighties, proceeding slowly and assuredly, with cape and a walking stick. Some of his attitudes were long out of date at the time, such as that Massey College, which he helped found in 1963, did not admit women until 1974. In some ways he was quite modern. Generally, though, Edwardian, but that is by no means a bad thing.

The first of the Deptford trilogy is Fifth Business (1970), which I’ve always liked, but it seems very old. Anyone writing a novel of that form now would be self-consciously recreating a work of a century ago, but that was his style fifty years ago: from fifty years before. It’s a very Canadian novel, but of a Canada that no longer exists. I still recommend it to anyone who wants to see what Canada (and Toronto) used to be like, but those who’ve read it don’t seem to like it.

The Manticore (1972) is the story of a minor character from the previous novel going through Jungian analysis in Switzerland. It’s still a wonderful introduction to Jung and his ideas about dreams and archetypes.

The last of the three is World of Wonders (1975), where Magnus Eisengrim, a magician who’s been a secondary figure in the previous books, relates in detail three episodes from his early life: in a third-rate carnival as a child in the 1920s; in a theatre company as a young man; and (briefly) repairing clockwork figures in Switzerland. He is performing the magic in a TV show about Robert-Houdin and is seized with the desire to reveal his past.

The novel is about 350 pages long, and 325 of it is Eisengrim talking. He talks and talks and talks and talks. Even allowing for the conceit of him explaining to his friends and the TV people how he became who he is, the length and language of his conversation are preposterous. Of the other 25 pages, about five are spoken by one woman, and the other twenty by the other men.

Eisengrim goes on and on and on and on, filling in many details about carnivals and touring theatre companies and magic and acting, all things I’m interested in, but he goes on and on and on and on. At great length. I had to skim. I’ll reread the other two books, but not World of Wonders. I just couldn’t take this man talking so much, trying to overwhelm us with all this erudition and these incredible experiences, be they wonderful or horrible.

I realized: This is what all of Robertson Davies is like for most people now.

Anchovies

23 September 2021 food

Nigella Lawson likes anchovies. In Cook, Eat, Repeat she has an “anchovy elixir” recipe, and she uses it as a base in a lot of things when she starts with oil in a pan: chop up a couple of anchovies and throw them in until they sort of melt, before you add onions and such, and they add a nice base to the flavour. (See all the recipes with anchovies in them on her site.)

I tried it and it really works, and now it’s a regular part of my cooking. For a while I got Allessia anchovy fillets (imported from Italy) that come in a little jar. Recently I picked up another brand, Club des Millionnaires (from Spain), but it was a while before I noticed what was on the cardboard package around the tin.

Fish she is very small.

The story on the company’s web site says the slogan comes from something someone said to the president.

Fish she is very small.

May I Borrow a Stapler?

22 September 2021 libraries staplers

This article has one of the finest titles in the entire library and information studies literature: May I Borrow a Stapler? Is This All Students Ask at the Service Desk in a University Library?

It was published in Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP), a very interesting and sometimes curious journal. “The purpose of the journal is to provide a forum for librarians and other information professionals to discover research that may contribute to decision making in professional practice. EBLIP publishes original research and commentary on the topic of evidence based library and information practice, as well as reviews of previously published research (evidence summaries) on a wide number of topics.” Some summaries I’ve read were surprisingly brisk and refreshing and did a fine job distilling earlier work.

This article is by Liv Inger Lamøy and Astrid Kilvik, both at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology University Library.

Objective: The objective of the study is to increase the knowledge about what questions students ask at the library desk and what the purpose is of their use of the desk. Our focus has been on the physical meetings with the students. The aim is to contribute to the discussion on the future development of the library service desk.

Betteridge’s law of headlines says that if a question is asked in a headline, the answer is “no.” Happily, it applies here.

However, I must point back almost six years to my post about the Triple Staple:

On Wednesday 10 February 2016, at about 3:45 pm, at the ref desk at Steacie, I hit a new record: three consecutive questions about refilling staplers. We have three staplers here and they all emptied within minutes of each other. Three questions, three different staplers. I call this the Triple Staple.

Nous

21 September 2021 vagaries

There’s an unfamiliar—to me—word that I came across recently in three places in quick succession: a Georgette Heyer novel, I think Black Sheep; Mick Herron’s Slow Horses; and an episode of BBC Radio Four’s More or Less. Perhaps I’d have known it if I’d studied more philosophy. The word is nous.

I looked it up in my two favourite dictionaries. The Chambers Dictionary (thirteenth edition, 2014) says:

n intellect; talent; common sense (inf.) [Gr nous, contracted from noos]

And The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (first edition, 1998) says:

1 Brit. informal common sense; gumption 2 Philos. the mind or intellect. [Greek]

One pronunciation of it, and the one Tim Harford used on More or Less, rhymes with “mouse.”

Nous.

(The Wikipedia entry for it is one of those that’s surprisingly long and and far longer than articles that deserve more attention, for example another one I was looking at recently, Tajiks. Probably there are many fictional characters designed by large corporations purely to make money that have longer articles than either.)

UPDATE (the next day): Today I heard the Great Lives episode where Yanis Varoufakis nominated Hypatia. In it expert witness Edith Hall, says, when asked about Hypatia’s personal life, “I think she was probably a very committed Neoplatonist, so she did I think believe in a Oneness, and that was identified by Plotinian Neoplatonists also with nous, which is brain power, and logos, which is reason, so this idea that somehow being spiritual and being highly intellectual go together.” She pronounced it “noos.”

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William Denton wtd@pobox.com Toronto, Ontario

Librarian, artist and licensed private investigator.

"Legendo autem et scribendo vitam procudito." Marcus Terentius Varro (11627 BCE)

Search Contents List of all blog posts Blog posts grouped by tags Burton and Gordon Fictional Dentons Fictional Footnotes Hardboiled and Noir Library Science Publications and Talks RARA-AVIS Old Stuff Projects Conforguration: configure things (servers and dotfiles) in Org. GHG.EARTH: a sonification of climate change. Listening to Art: field recordings of visual art. STAPLR: Sounds in Time Actively Performing Library Reference. Theatre Science. France Audio Montage on framework radio: episodes #691 and #693. See also Kady MacDonald Denton, children's book author and illustrator The Arts and Letters Club of Toronto Atmospheric CO₂

March 1958: 314.43 ppm
September 2021: 416.87 ppm

Increase: 102.44 ppm
Change: 32.6 %

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