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November 16, 2007

Nary a Cross Word

Though I’m not good at crossword puzzles, crossword puzzle definitions come to me spontaneously now and then. Or I try to think them up when I’m bored or can’t sleep. For example:

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Definition: A place for firewood? Answer: a log cabinet.
Definition: Movements of a certain poet and a certain painter? Answer: cummings & Goings.
Definition: An exfoliated arbor? Answer: a treeless trellis.
Definition: An uncertain beginner? Answer: a rocky rookie.
Definition: A person with laryngitis? Answer: a hoarse whisperer.
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I have another strange habit of thinking up spoonerisms, especially on long bus rides. For example:
Hook & Ladder / Lad & Hooker
Nook & Cranny / Crook & Nanny
Blue Chip Stocks / Blue Chopsticks
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And this, which isn’t a true spoonerism: Snub Nose / Stub Toes
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Another category of wordplay is the Homonym Pun. To date I’ve thought up only one:
Definition: A twirling goddess and a favorite sports event:
Answer: Whirled Ceres / World Series
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I’m intrigued by contradictory homonyms. One pair is Raze & Raise. A crossword entry using a Contradictory Homonym might be:
Definition: Harvest a sugar crop. Answer: Raze Cane.
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Since this blog is rather short, here are some recent “Overheard in Passing” jottings:

Date: November 6, 2007
Place: The A train, rush hour
Who: Two 20-something women
Appearance: Racy nonchalance
Attitude: Dubious
Comment: “Neither one of them reads between the lines, and they’re both sending each other signals. I don’t think it’s going to work out.”
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Date: November 11, 2007
Place: 7th Ave. local, 66 St. stop (Lincoln Center)
Who: Elderly woman to her husband
Appearance: All dressed up
Attitude: Excited
Comment: “OK, this is it! This is it! If you want to see Mozart, this is it! If you want to hear Mozart, this is the place.” (Coincidentally, the notebook I had with me to jot this down had a portrait of Mozart on the cover.)
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Date: November 11, 2007
Place: Washington Square, a Sunday morning
Who: 40-something man on his cell phone
Appearance: Priapic casual
Attitude: Rapturous
Comment: “I’d stay with you in New York. I’d stay with you in Laos. I’d stay with you in Paris.”
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Date: November 11, 2007
Place: Franklin Street, Tribeca
Who: 30-something woman and 30-something man
Appearance: Corporate casual
Attitude: She, tentatively: “Was it George Picard?”
Attitude: He, patiently: “George Peppard.”

Posted by Jane on 6:00 PM | Comments (0)

November 5, 2007

Que Seurat Seurat

At the beginning of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, in the voice of Miss Toklas, writes: “I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken. . .” * When I stand in front of artworks of indubitable genius, I have my own telltale signs, which are as reliable as Alice’s bells: a prickle behind the eyes, a tickle in the throat, quickened breath. Such was my response upon seeing Seurat’s drawings last Friday at the Museum of Modern Art. On the sixth floor of the museum, far above an installation of colossal, aggressively gesticulating sculptures dangling in the museum’s rarefied air, was an intimate gallery of rooms full of Seurats. I’ve had a book of Seurat drawings by Robert L. Herbert since I was 13, and have always preferred them to the famous Pointillist paintings. Most of those mysterious conte crayon drawings in my book were now hanging on the walls in front of me, along with a number of small (about 6” x 9 or 10”), brilliant oil studies on wood. Seurat is surely a master of the grisaille range from velvety blacks to luminous whites. The pictures are at once weighty and ineffable, and seem to emerge from the paper like a scene glimpsed through half-closed eyes, or out of a half-remembered dream, when half indicates the whole, when less, as the modernists say, is more. One stunner is “Courbevoie, Factories by Moonlight” (1882-83), a near abstraction: black line, white circle, dark rectangle anchored by grays. The “facts” of a stack, a moon, a building, chimney smoke and landscape register more or less subliminally and throb with impact. Here’s how reduction resonates with truth more eloquently than does an accurate record of literal narrative detail; here is how poetry beggars prose as the far more qualitatively Real.

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*For the curious, these are Gertrude Stein [first on the list], Pablo Picasso, and Alfred [North] Whitehead.

Posted by Jane on 2:42 PM | Comments (0)