Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Leave your guess(es) in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

*

No need: the answer is now the comments.

Related reading
All OCA mystery actor posts (Pinboard)

[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” I use actor.]

Strange calligraphy

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Also from this novel
Pascal and Nietzsche : “Poor practically the whole world” : Where is Penelope weaving?

A note to Pam Bondi

Pam,

The third season of The White Lotus is over and done. Parker Posey got the role of Victoria Ratliff. We regret to inform you that there are no further auditions scheduled at this time.

Regards, &c.

[Context: Bondi’s performance at a House Judiciary Committee hearing today.]

Where is Penelope weaving?

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Here’s Pintoricchio’s painting.

Also from this novel
Pascal and Nietzsche : “Poor practically the whole world”

A notebook sighting

[From Mank (dir. David Fincher, 2020). Click for a larger view.]

The Spiral Sight Saver Notebook, a stenographer’s notebook, is “a superior notebook with leaves that turn fast — and lie flat.” But that’s not all:

The Special Green-White paper in this “SIGHT SAVER” Note Book eliminates glare, saves the eyes, and makes it easier to take dictation and transcribe notes.

Good enough for the screenplay of Citizen Kane , good enough for anybody’s words.

Here’s a side-opening Spiral for sale right now.

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)

“Redescription often humiliates”

Making my way through Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (1989), I found myself startled by this passage:

[T]he best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless. Consider what happens when a child’s precious possessions — the little things around which he weaves fantasies that make him a little different from all other children — are redescribed as “trash,” and thrown away. Or consider what happens when these possessions are made to look ridiculous alongside the possessions of another, richer, child. Something like that presumably happens to a primitive culture when it is conquered by a more advanced one. The same sort of thing sometimes happens to nonintellectuals in the presence of intellectuals. All these are milder forms of what happened [in Nineteen Eighty-Four ] to Winston Smith when he was arrested: They broke his paperweight and punched Julia in the belly, thus initiating the process of making him describe himself in O’Brien’s terms rather than his own. The redescribing ironist, by threatening one’s final vocabulary, and thus one’s ability to make sense of oneself in one’s own terms rather than hers, suggests that one’s self and one’s world are futile, obsolete, powerless. Redescription often humiliates.

A little context:

Rorty defines the ironist as someone who fulfills these conditions:

(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.

“Final vocabulary” is Rorty’s term for a set of words that justify one’s actions, belief, and life. The ironist understands that her final vocabulary is contingent, subject to revision, that it has no claim to some ultimate truth about what is “out there.” Rorty says that ironism results from an “awareness of the power of redescription,” an awareness that one’s sense of things could very well be different. But, he adds, “most people do not want to be redescribed.”

The fleeting glimpse of humiliation and loss in childhood in the passage above appears eighty-nine pages into the book, with nothing remotely like it before or (at least thus far) after. I wonder if it might have been drawn from Rorty’s life. Here’s Rorty talking about his childhood.

Related reading
A handful of OCA Richard Rorty posts (Pinboard)

A pencil factory now holds deportees

From The Guardian : In 2013 Faber-Castell shut down its pencil factory in Costa Rica. In 2018 the company gave the factory to Costa Rica to use as a shelter for people fleeing Nicaragua. And now the building is used to hold people who have been deported from the United States.

The Guardian alerted Faber-Castell to the building’s new use. It’s not clear what the company will (or can?) do: “Faber-Castell did not answer questions about whether it intended to take any further action.”

Recently updated

ICE, close to home Bond paid and accepted.

Word of the day: engross

I’ve been meaning for some time to look up the verb engross. The word turns out to be full of surprises. In the Oxford English Dictionary , the earliest meanings (from 1304) have to do with handwriting:

To write in large letters; chiefly, and now almost exclusively, to write in a peculiar character appropriate to legal documents; hence, to write out or express in legal form.

A citation from Samuel Pepys’s Diary (1664–65): “The story of the several Archbishops of Canterbury, engrossed in vellum.”

A second set of meanings (from 1400) have to do with dealing with things “in the gross”:

To buy up wholesale; esp. to buy up the whole stock, or as much as possible, of (a commodity) for the purpose of “regrating” or retailing it at a monopoly price. Obsolete exc. Historical .

A third set of meanings (from 1561) have to do with rendering things “gross, dense, or bulky.” So let us move on, or back, to the second set of meanings. That’s where to find the engross that we know and find so engaging (from 1709):

To absorb or engage the whole attention or all the faculties of.

A lovely partial sentence from William Black’s novel The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872) is among the citations: “He was entirely engrossed in attending to her wants.”

Yes, attend, bub, attend.

The three sets of meanings come into English in three ways, says the OED : from the Anglo-Norman engrosser , “to write in large letters”; from the French en gros , “in the lump, by wholesale”; and from the French engrosser , “to make big, thick, or gross”.

If you’re still reading, you must be engrossed by this post, as I was when writing it. But this post isn’t nearly as engrossing as Bad Bunny’s halftime show.

Samuel Charters’s The Blues

“In recognition of Black History Month, the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive (IULMIA) is proud to highlight films from our collections that center Black communities, voices, and lived experiences”: From Blues to Banjo: Black Music in the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive.

This week: Samuel Charters’s short 1973 film The Blues, with J.D. Short, Pink Anderson and his son “Little Pink,” Furry Lewis, Baby Tate, Memphis Willie B., Gus Cannon, and Sleepy John Estes.