Talking crossword.

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Mom & Pop Accounting.

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"There’s almost nothing I like more than a laughing fit. It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm or a sneeze."

"I wish I could say that only the comedies of Aristophanes make me laugh, but then my pants would catch on fire. I have cracked up at bons mots, but also at dirty jokes, dumb pets, and all sorts of things I 'shouldn’t' laugh at. Someone recently told me a joke that involved the pun 'a frayed knot,' and I laughed like a lunatic. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. Laughing is laughing."

Writes Roz Chast in "Roz Chast on George Booth’s Cartoons/Every object is lovingly drawn, in a way that only Booth could draw them. Every detail enhances the scene" (The New Yorker).

That reminds me, I recently laughed hysterically — way way too much — at the tiniest little non-joke on the old TV show that Meade puts on sometimes, "Leave It to Beaver." Somehow, the father (Ward) saw fit to ask his wife (June), "What is it, mattress-turning day?" It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm....

Things I talked about with Meade this morning.

1. How Tucker Carlson told Joe Rogan that Bari Weiss is a fraud and not honest at all. She called Tulsi Gabbard a "toady" and she didn't know what "toady" meant.

2. The similarities and differences between the Bob Dylan song "You Got to Serve Somebody" and the Band song "Unfaithful Servant."

3. The use of the tuba in popular music recorded in the last 60 years and why it matters if they had an actual tuba player in the studio as opposed to a digitalized tuba sound.

4. "Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole."

5. Whether flags of foreign countries should be waved by members of Congress and how the use of the flag may mean different things to different people.

6. It was Richard Nixon who originated the wearing of a flag lapel pin and how everyone followed along and now they can't stop.

7. The way some people these days are calling their loved one "my person." I heard it in Salman Rushdie's new book "Knife" and I opened The New Yorker at random and saw it in a Roz Chast cartoon.

8. Some people call a dog's owner the dog's "person," and that seems related to the old joke "Are you walking him or is he walking you"?

9. Bill Maher asked why people want drag queens reading to children and said it would be better to have disabled people reading, but drag queens are entertainers and disabled people are not. 

10. How little children shouldn't be exposed to overly exciting entertainment and even peekaboo can be too intense for young minds.

11. How it's already too late to go south for warmer weather and we are better off here in the north, where there was frost on the grass this morning.

12. How fluent and funny Tucker Carlson was describing his boss at the New York Post who had a hairy back that he would rub against the door jamb while he talked to Tucker and the 5 or 6 ways that Tucker could have known that the man had a hairy back.

13. What a big part of life hairiness is — for the lower animals and for us, the humans. 

14. Was the hairy-backed man John Podhoretz? Carlson mutters the name.

15. The annoyingness of Carlson's laugh and how hard you have to commit to do a good enough imitation of it.

16. The energy Joe and Tucker had. Doesn't Tucker wear a hairpiece and Joe just shaved off all his hair.

17. Meeting for coffee and not an entire meal so you're free to leave whenever you want and how some people have trouble getting out of small-talk conversations and this one simple trick that's all you need.

18. The perception that a conversation can't end until both participants want it to end and the way some people keep adding new topics as if keeping a conversation going is a game.

19. The very low level of tennis playing that has you just trying to keep the ball in play as long as possible.

20. How all this talk is taking the place of writing on the blog, but I could just make a blog post out of all the topics that didn't make it onto the blog because I was talking about everything with Meade.

"I needed to come back to the city. A lot of it for me has to do with not having to drive."

"Because not driving when you live in the suburbs, or being a quasi driver — I have a lot of anxiety about it, and when I’m in the city I can go anywhere I want. I feel free. I feel like an actual grown-up. [What is it about driving?] Ugh! There’s the car itself: tires falling off, a blow out, a car exploding. One time I was driving and the front hood started rattling and the whole drive I pictured the hood of the car flying up and then my crashing and not only killing myself but killing tons of people. I hate it! I hate changing lanes. I hate merging. I hate trucks. Everything about it is hateful. Also, you’re going so [expletive] fast! A slight miscalculation and it’s disaster."

Said Roz Chast, quote in "Roz Chast Knows You’ll Always Regret Leaving the City for the Suburbs" (NYT).

That's an interview with David Marchese, published a few weeks ago, noticed today because it was linked at the bottom of the new David Marchese interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, blogged in the previous post. 

Roz Chast has a new book: "I Must Be Dreaming."

"Stop Doing This To Your Blueberries."

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"My husband and I both do the shopping, but I’m the one who usually goes to the big grocery store. I kind of like it."

"I like to look at the packaging and the strange products—like the 'outer-space-flavored' soda that Coca-Cola released last year."

From an interview with the cartoonist Roz Chast, interviewed — at "Roz Chast’s 'Fireworks Megastore'/The artist discusses stumbling across surprises while shopping, and rebelling against efficiency" — about her new New Yorker cover.

Have you ever done artwork based on the visual stimulation of shopping? This was based on Chast's encounter with one of those big fireworks stores:

"Did these work for anyone?"

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Arsenic and old wallpaper.

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"The Ambitious Guest."

I was rereading the excellent Roz Chast memoir "Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?" when I got to the page "Dirty Checkers":



This time through the book, I stopped, loaded Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales" into my Project Gutenberg app and read "The Ambitious Guest" right then and there. Why live at the base of a mountain that is regularly signaling its willingness to roll down and bury you? They had their reasons. What's the point of moving on? The man who would move on got buried too. And indeed, when they heard the mountain collapsing they ran out of the house, to their safe spot, and the mountain spared the house and flattened them in their safe spot. Maybe stay where you are. If you jump somewhere else, that may be the very spot where you'll get killed.

The next morning the light smoke was seen stealing from the cottage chimney up the mountain-side. Within, the fire was yet smouldering on the hearth, and the chairs in a circle round it, as if the inhabitants had but gone forth to view the devastation of the slide and would shortly return to thank Heaven for their miraculous escape. All had left separate tokens by which those who had known the family were made to shed a tear for each. Who has not heard their name? The story has been told far and wide, and will for ever be a legend of these mountains.... Woe for the high-souled youth with his dream of earthly immortality! His name and person utterly unknown, his history, his way of life, his plans, a mystery never to be solved, his death and his existence equally a doubt,—whose was the agony of that death-moment?

"Gardening has been a solace to so many... because it invokes the prospect of some kind of future, however uncertain and unpredictable it may be."

"'When the future seems either very bleak, or people are too depressed to imagine one, gardening gives you a toehold in the future'.... It can also help reconcile us to the inevitability of our demise. At the Barn garden, Tom Stuart-Smith told me that every spring... he goes around the garden with a notebook, to make plans about where to add things in the autumn. 'I think a lot about next year, but I also think, absolutely, about what it’s going to be like when I am dead,' he said. The future promised by a garden may not always be ours to enjoy, but a future there will be, with or without us in it.... Under the current circumstances, I have no great confidence that my mother will ever again travel to London and see this garden of mine. 'Have you room for a honeysuckle?' she wrote to me. I planted one in a sunny spot against the wall, in the hope that the near-invisible trellis of wires that I hammered to the brick will help it stand upright, as if it were doing so on its own."

From "The Therapeutic Power of Gardening/Can anxious minds find solace working with plants? A therapist and her husband, a garden designer, say yes" by Rebecca Mead (The New Yorker).

Have you been gardening during the coronavirus lockdown?

ADDED: "Gardening has been a solace to so many... because it invokes the prospect of some kind of future..." Invokes?! Should be evokes. If The New Yorker is already getting stuff like that wrong, the future looks kind of dismal!

ALSO: From the New Yorker cartoon bank, there's this from May 2019 by Roz Chast:



If the trolls were saying "The world is falling apart, and YOU'RE GARDENING?!?" back in May 2019, imagine what they're saying in 2020.

Bookshelves.

The best thing about these Skype TV interviews is we can be on the lookout for problematic material on politicians’ bookshelves.

I’m compiling a database of MPs who might be reading beyond the scope of permitted opinions.

Report any suspicious books to me. I’ll do the rest. pic.twitter.com/dPTKvj6Aes

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) May 4, 2020

Ha. Not looking to call down the PC police, but this is just something else about the lockdown and the bookshelves, from Roz Chast:

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That's the one Philip K. Dick book that I read, loved, and found to be sufficient: "The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch."

Also:

Nailed it. Depth. Color. Composition. And cool glasses. 10/10 @AlRoker pic.twitter.com/hUM7FoH2x4

— Room Rater (@ratemyskyperoom) May 3, 2020

"No one encouraged me to be a cartoonist.... I showed my work and they just said, 'I didn’t know you were this unhappy.'..."

"My dream was to be a working cartoonist for the Village Voice... Because that was Jules Feiffer, Mark Alan Stamaty, Stan Mack. There was something very idiosyncratic, very New York, about them, all social comment and not a gag panel. And the New Yorker cartoon was a gag panel. I liked that, but I had no interest in doing that. I didn’t see myself as part of that. I submitted because I thought, Why not? I was working for the Voice and for the Lampoon, and I thought I should try The New Yorker. It’s cartoons—same deal. I think it was a Wednesday—I called up and found their drop-off day, and I left my portfolio. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing ever since. I was absolutely flabbergasted and terrified when I found out I had sold something.... ... I went in to see [Lee Lorenz, the New Yorker’s art editor] and he pulled out a cartoon, and he said, ‘We want to buy this! Are you excited?’ ‘Yeah, I am,’ I said. I thought I might be dreaming. A little bit out of body. I noticed that the lights were very like my elementary school. I liked that it’s not exactly shabby but nothing trying to impress you. Places that are trying to impress me always scare me. They don’t impress me, but they scare me. He told me that Shawn [William Shawn, the magazine’s longtime editor] really liked my work. And I had no idea who Shawn was! I assumed it was a first name, someone named Sean, like Sean Connery, who somehow was allowed to like your work. I nodded. ‘That sounds good.’ I did meet him later, and he doffed his hat and I doffed mine, and I wondered why I was doing this."

From "Scenes from the Life of Roz Chast/In the past four decades, the cartoonist has created a universe of spidery lines and nervous spaces, turning anxious truth-telling into an authoritative art" (in The New Yorker).

Speaking of exciting scenes in the life of an artist, I selected that quote and cut and pasted it here before reading it to the end, and I was flabbergasted to see Sean Connery come up. It's so utterly random. The previous post, which I started writing because I was interested in Dennis Hopper's photography, moved through a sequence of things and ended up on Sean Connery. I'd just created a new tag for "Sean Connery" and added it retrospectively to 3 other posts. Sean Connery had popped up only 3 times in 16 years of writing on this blog, and now, this morning, in the space of a few minutes, he's popped up twice. All 5 of the Sean Connery appearances on this blog have been minimal and random. I'll list them in the order of importance — importance with regard to Sean Connery — with the least trivial thing at #1:

5. Roz Chast heard the last name "Shawn" and thought of the first name "Sean," as in "Sean Connery."

4. Darrell Hammond was identified (in 2011) as the SNL actor who impersonates "Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Sean Connery."

3. Dream-casting a movie based on a new Sandra Day O'Connor biography in 2005, one commenter pictures "a cameo appearance from Sir Sean Connery as Robert Bork, who turns out to have been the arch-villain all along!"

2. This morning's discussion of the 1995 Sean Connery movie "Just Cause."

1. My revelation that I haven't seen a James Bond movie since the last Sean Connery Bond movie, "Diamonds Are Forever" ("It was 1971, and we thought James Bond was absurdly passé").

"The 4 Clods."

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A drawing from when I was twelve. Going through old stuff. "Clod" = loser and I knew that's what I was

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"Which post had that comment?" I ask after checking for the comment in last night's café...

... which begins with a photograph of flowers.

The line has become a running joke around here at Meadhouse: "The world is falling apart, and YOU'RE GARDENING?!?"

Where was that if not in the post that shows Meade's garden?

But it wasn't a comment, Meade tells me. In just one day, I'd lost track of the source and imagined we were talking about one of my trolls. And that demonstrates the perfection of this cartoon (in The New Yorker) by the great Roz Chast:



IN THE COMMENTS: Ignorance is Bliss said:

I made an on-topic comment about the garden, noting that any real gardener could tell how bad a gardener Trump is.
Then the zinnia started obsessively attacking me.
I sent you a private email requesting that you rip out all the zinnia, but of course you did not.
Your new weeding policy is a joke...

"My mother does not like to admit that anything is ever sad or wrong, so if my father would say something like, 'During the Depression …' She’d say...'"

"'Oh, Dick, there was no Depression.' She was like a Depression-denier"/"My mother was more like a personal depression-denier. Her whole thing was if you were sad, she would say, 'Stop staring at your navel.' When I grew up, I didn’t know what other people talked to each other about, because there were so many things we didn’t talk about"/"My mother was very can-do. She told me, 'Nobody needs more than four hours of sleep.' I hate sleeping. Guilt gets me up"/"I like to sleep because I’m interested in dreaming, but it’s more like profound laziness or momentum. Once I’m awake, going to sleep just seems so annoying, and once I’m sleeping, waking up seems so annoying."

From "Roz Chast and Patricia Marx Mine the Mother Lode/The longtime friends on their new book, the pleasures — and perils — of childhood, and the remarkable success of their indie uke band" (NYT).

I've liked both of them for a long time. It's a funny interview. Their new book is "Why Don't You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?: A Mother's Suggestions" — and I just pre-ordered it.

I just happened to run into that, but with 3 in a row on the topic of motherhood, this gets my "blog has a theme today" tag. First time since last November!

At the Chaos Café...

... work your charms.

(And remember the Althouse Portal to Amazon. If you want to buy what I just bought, buy "Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York" by Roz Chast.)

"There was a new society..."

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Sorry this is so long. “Feel free” to ignore.

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January-o-phobia.

A nice Roz Chast New Yorker cover:



My January calendar has 4 positive dates. 2 are personal to me, my birthday (12) and my bloggiversary (14). But I also have 2 others that we all share and that are very important, I believe, psychologically, especially if you live in a northern latitude where you must deal with the short days and long nights.

January 5: The End of Darkmonth. Darkmonth is the darkest monthlong period of the year, that is, the period with the winter solstice at the center. The solstice was December 21st, so I put the last day of Darkmonth on January 5th.

The second day of note, following this line of reasoning, is January 20th, which marks the end of the darkest 2-month period. I don't have a name for the 15 days on either side of Darkmonth — Nonconsecutive-Second-to-Darkest-Month.

But we just got past that, and in 2 more weeks, the darkest 3 months will be over. So even though it will only be February 5 (or 6th), which seems a long way from the end of winter, if your problem with winter is, as it is for me, the darkness, you should see winter as over.

"I draw with Rotring Rapidoliners, 0.35 which are no longer made. I have to scour eBay for them."

"I’m so afraid of running through my stockpile that I have learned how to refill them, even though they are not meant to be refilled. The ink is very, very black and completely waterproof. When I put watercolor on top of the ink, it doesn’t bleed."

I love the cartoonist Roz Chast, but this is getting my "things not believed" tag. Its unbelievability is on its face. If you're desperate for a rare item, why would you stir up competition and tell them where to go? Is there some other pen that the named pen is standing in for? Has Chast already scoured the last 0.35 Rapidoliner out of eBay and moved on to the hope that all the people searching for it will get back to Rotring and inspire them to make it again.

ADDED: I'm starting to believe. The idea is: this public plea and unsolicited endorsement should move Rotring to make the 0.35 Rapidoliner again. Get on it, Rotring. Please click on that Rotring link if you believe in Roz Chast. It could bring Tinkerbell back to life.