Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Cucoloris

Cucoloris: A screen with oddly shaped holes cut through it, placed before a light source to throw diverse shadows on an otherwise uniform surface. (Source: Idiom Savant: Slang As It Is Slung.) Also spelled cucaloris, kookaloris, kukaloris, cookaloris, cucalorus, etc. Shortened to cookie, kook, or cuke. Alternate names: gobo, ulcer, dapple sheet.

 

Wooden cucoloris, B&H Photo and Video, New York.

 

The film critic Roger Ebert, who died last week, included kookalouris in Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary, published in 1994. From his entry:

Popular in the 1930s; back in style again with the movies of Steven Spielberg, who uses a kookalouris with underlighting to show faces that seem to be illuminated by reflections from pots of gold, buckets of diamonds, pools of fire, pirate maps, and radioactive kidneys.

(Read more of Ebert’s movie tropes, including Inevitable Sister, Mid-Wife Crisis, Wunza Movies, and “Fruit Cart!”, in an excerpt published in the Visual Thesaurus. And scroll down for more on Ebert.)

It’s fairly well established that cucoloris, however you spell it, comes from the world of Hollywood cinematographers. Beyond that, however, the word’s origins and etymology are frustratingly unclear. In an episode that aired last year, Grant Barrett, co-host of the radio show “A Way with Words,” told listeners that he’d spent “days” researching a Double-Tongued Dictionary entry for cookie.

“Hollywood is filled with people who like to invent myth,” Barrett said. “I counted seven different origin stories for this term, and they’re fun, but they’re throwaway.” The best story he encountered is from a footnote in a 1954 issue of the Western Folklore journal, which called cucoloris “a coined word of no special philological significance or implication.” The writer did suggest, however, that cucoloris “might be related to the famed director George Cukor.”

Barrett’s etymological note for the cookie entry doesn’t mention Cukor, but it doesn’t reach any other satisfying conclusions, either:

A claimed etymology is that kukaloris is Greek for “breaking of light,” but there seems to be no evidence to support this, nor can the etymological claims in the 2001 cite below* be verified. Another claim is that it is named after its inventor, a Mr. Cucoloris; however, this, too, lacks supporting evidence.

* The word “cucaloris” comes from the Greek for shadow play.» —by Ivan Curry Directing & Producing for Television Nov. 29, 2001.

Nor is there evidence to support the assertion in TV Tropes:

The word cukoloris is Gaelic and means “ghost charm.” How a Gaelic word became a standard term in film production is unknown.

__

A note about Roger Ebert: I never met or corresponded with him, but I was among his many admiring readers and Twitter followers—even when I was muttering “WTF?” about his conclusions. In 2010, I attended a program at the San Francisco International Film Festival at which he received an award; cancer had already taken away his ability to talk, but his impish wit and pointed opinions suffered not a bit from the intervention of a speech synthesizer. After answering questions from the stage of the Castro Theater, he introduced Julia, which starred Tilda Swinton – “ Saint Tilda,” Ebert called her – and which Ebert assured us was a great, great film we were privileged to see. (Released in 2009, it had been largely ignored by theaters.) Now, I grant that Swinton is never less than fully committed to a role, but Julia was godawful: violent, amoral, ugly, pointless, and, at 144 minutes, seemingly interminable. About a third of the audience left before it was over. I stuck it out, but – to borrow a phrase Ebert himself made famous – I hated, hated, hated this movie. And yet I loved Ebert for championing it, and for being not just a critic but also an exuberant fan. I will miss him a lot.

Michael Cronan, 1951–2013

Many of us who work in branding are mourning the death of Michael Cronan on January 1. Cronan, who lived and worked in Berkeley, was an artist, graphic designer, product developer, brand strategist, and teacher. With his wife and creative partner, Karin Hibma, he also created names for many companies and products, most notably TiVo and Kindle. He had been diagnosed with cancer five years ago.

I met Michael Cronan a couple of times over the years and was impressed by the breadth of his skills – he truly merited that overused term “Renaissance man” – and his generous, thoughtful manner. I wrote about how Cronan named Kindle in 2008.

In 2009, Steve Rubenstein wrote a more detailed profile of Cronan for the San Francisco Chronicle, which I recommend to you. It opens with Cronan and Hibma noodling around with Scrabble tiles, looking for promising combinations. Dealing with clients, Cronan told Rubenstein, is “at least as tricky” as dealing with Scrabble tiles. “Very few clients have any idea what they’re asking for,” Cronan said. “They need a name and a logo and, to them, it’s like they need a loading dock or an actuarial table.”

But it’s so much more, as this passage from the article reveals:

The creation of TiVo is ancient history in the advertising racket, Cronan said, but the story bears repeating. Cronan and Hibma held a half dozen meetings in Silicon Valley with the manufacturer, hashing out possible names for the device. At the time, a competitor was marketing a similar gizmo, called Replay, and Cronan needed something better.

TiVo, Cronan knew, was the right thing to call the device, even though its manufacturer was more impressed with some other choices that Cronan was kicking around: Lasso and Bongo. Lasso was a contender, Cronan said, because the device lassos TV programs the way a cowboy lassos cattle. And Bongo was a possibility because the gizmo had two round things on top, like bongo drums. But both of those names, Cronan felt, were lousy. In all, Cronan recalled, the designers were considering no fewer than 800 names for the product.

None said television as well as TiVo did, Cronan argued. And with its capitalized V in the middle, it sounded revolutionary as all get-out. After Cronan, also an award-winning graphic designer, came up with the logo for the product - that smiling, walking television with the rabbit ears - Replay never knew what hit it.

For more about Cronan and Hibma’s approach to the naming process, read this Q&A on the Wordnik blog, published just over a month ago.

Michael Cronan’s life and work were an inspiration to all of us who build brands. His death is a huge loss.

August Linkfest

Crowdsourcing a name for a new apple-flavored Mountain Dew beverage seemed like such a good idea. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, plenty. “Suddenly, its gallery of suggestions featured such winners as ‘Gushing Granny,’ ‘Diabeetus,’ and my personal favorite, ‘Fapple’.” Mountain Dew now says the campaign was created by a local customer, not the company; the “offensive content”—created by unknown pranksters—has been scrubbed from the “Dub the Dew” website.

*

My two posts about the origins of the expression “the whole nine yards” (here and here) continue to be among the most-searched entries on this blog. But the story isn’t finished: New research has unearthed a couple of citations that go back to the 1950s, a full decade earlier than previously assumed. Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the new findings, “Stretching Out ‘The Whole Nine Yards’.”

*

Speaking of idioms: Absolutely nobody knows where the phrase “round robin” comes from.

*

The most-loathed words in the English language, according to readers of The Atlantic, include moist (of course!), curate, slacks, and artisanal.

*

Love logos? Love data? Check out Emblemetric, a new blog by James I. Bowie about trends in logo design. No seat-of-the-pants stuff, this: Bowie bases his reports on more than 1.2 million logos in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. Sample finding: “The use of two stars as a design element in US logos increased by 170 percent in 2011 over the preceding five-year period. Looking back over time, we can see that, following a pronounced dip in the 1970s, logos with two stars have been claiming an increasing share of new trademark filings for the last three decades.” Be still, my geekish heart.

*

Set aside several hours to wander happily through the History of Advertising Trust, “the largest archive of British advertising in the world.” There’s also a lovely gallery of ghost signs. (Via @boswellaffleck.)

*

At Union Square Café, a “K1” is a diner who will be proposing to his date. At Michael’s New York, “Lawn” is a chopped salad chopped extra fine. Ben Schott deciphers these and other secret codes used in the dining rooms and kitchens of some well-known New York City restaurants, .

*

Eleven wonderful words with no precise equivalent in English. Quite a few are new to me, including bilita mpash (Bantu for “the opposite of a nightmare”) and ya-arburnee (Arabic for “may you bury me,” i.e., the expressed hope that you die before your beloved does). (Hat tip: @ourboldhero).

*

What’s the nerdiest preposition of them all? Nope, not “notwithstanding.” Not even close.

*

Lexicographer Kory Stamper on color definitions in Webster’s Third International Dictionary: “You could spend an hour alone getting lost in ‘cerise’ (‘a moderate red that is slightly darker than claret (sense 3a), slightly lighter than Harvard crimson (sense 1), very slightly bluer and duller than average strawberry (sense 2a), and bluer and very slightly lighter than Turkey red’). No doubt people did. That may explain why we don’t define colors this way anymore.”

*

I want a wall-size poster of this Is the New diagram, which documents “every instance of the phrase ‘is the new’ encountered from various sources in 2005.” Samples: “October is the new December,” “staying in is the new going out,” and “flat is the new round.” (Via Diane Fischler.)

*

“Ms. and Mrs.,” a small personal-care-products company, was constantly being misidentified, usually as “Mr. and Mrs.” So the founders hired professionals to come up with a new name. Smart move. (Via @alanbrew.)

*

A wonderful list of paradoxes from virtually every discipline. I’m still pondering the Service Recovery Paradox: “Successfully fixing a problem with a defective product may lead to higher consumer satisfaction than in the case where no problem occurred at all.” (Via @operativewords.)

*

I’m sure you’ll have quibbles and additions, but this Digital Trends list of “The top 10 worst car names of all times” includes some incontestable champions, like the Studebaker Dictator and Isuzu’s Mysterious Utility Wizard. (Via @lexiconbranding.)

*

From the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Mary Norris on “Semicolons; So Tricky”: “I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.”

*

From the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Ben Yagoda on “The Point of Exclamation”: “A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, ‘Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.’”

*

Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and transformative editor of Cosmopolitan, died Monday. From the New York Times front-page obit: “She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.” Ouch. It’s easy to mock Brown, and Cosmo, but let’s not forget that in the early years of Brown’s editorship the magazine published work by Patricia Highsmith, John Fowles, and Tom Wolfe, as these covers from the 1960s attest. And brava to Brown for saying this in 1964:

I personally don’t feel that the world is going to the dogs or that young people are inferior to their counterparts of a previous generation. Our moral codes have changed slightly, but what we have now is a lot better than the days of stricter moral codes when there was child labor, no equality for women, no federal aid for destitute people, plenty of robber barons and lynching.

Source: Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon’s 2009 biography of Brown. (Hat tip: The Hairpin.)

Nora Ephron, 1941-2012

I didn’t know Nora Ephron, but that isn’t stopping me from taking her death—yesterday, of leukemia—very personally. Just a couple of weeks ago, after all, she’d been in my car, talking about her career at the New York Post, her incipient bald spot (she called it “my Aruba,” and you really have to hear her explain why), and that travesty known as the egg-white omelet. She sounded feisty and funny and thoroughly, you know, alive.

OK, she wasn’t physically in my car. But her voice was there, reading her most recent collection of essays, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, an audiobook I’d checked out from the library. I listened to all three discs, and then I listened to them again. And I remembered, again, how much Nora Ephron has meant to me.

Most of the tributes to Ephron have focused on her hugely successful movies. I’m sorry to say—which is, by the way, a phrase I associate with Ephron, as is “by the way”—that I remain a grumpy skeptic. Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and When Harry Met Sally are too slick and schmaltzy for my taste, with heavy-handed soundtrack cues telling you exactly what to think and when to weep.

It was her journalism and essays that made me an Ephron fan, beginning with pieces in Esquire like “A Few Words About Breasts” (whose slam-bam ending was shamelessly swiped by Lionel Shriver in her novel So Much for That) and continuing through her sharp-eyed, hilarious work for The New Yorker and Huffington Post, some of which was collected in I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006) and I Remember Nothing (2011). Here was a woman who could be smart and funny on deadline. I loved her ear for the rhythm of a sentence and her eye for everyday nuttiness and sadness. I wanted to learn from her. I wanted to imitate her. I wanted to be her.

Except, probably, for the miserable marriage to that two-timing bum Carl Bernstein. Which, of course, she turned into a best-selling novel and hit movie, both called Heartburn. Take that, Watergate Boy.

You can listen here to an excerpt from the title essay of I Remember Nothing. (Thank you, Amazon.) And here—because you know how much I love umlauts—is an excerpt from one of my favorite recent Ephron essays for The New Yorker, a Stieg Larsson parody called “The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut”:

Salander opened the door a crack and spent several paragraphs trying to decide whether to let Blomkvist in. Many italic thoughts flew through her mind. Go away. Perhaps. So what.Etc.

“Please,” he said. “I must see you. The umlaut on my computer isn’t working.”

He was cradling an iBook in his arms. She looked at him. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at her. And then she did what she usually did when she had run out of italic thoughts: she shook her head.

“I can’t really go on without an umlaut,” he said. “We’re in Sweden.”

But it wasn’t all wit on wry for Ephron. Read or listen to “Pentimento,” her essay about Lillian Hellman, in I Remember Nothing, to see how Ephron could illuminate the contradictions of a legendary personality and eulogize the painful end of a long friendship.

The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy, who interviewed Ephron for a 2009 profile in the magazine, has written a graceful remembrance. The New York Timesobituary, by Charles McGrath, is comprehensive and revealing. (I’d forgotten all about Ephron’s directing debut, This Is My Life, which flopped.)

Then there’s NPR’s tribute, which combines a report by Neda Ulaby (whose name would no doubt have tickled Nora Ephron no end) with an intro and outro by “Morning Edition” anchor Renee Montagne. In the outro, at about 3:23, Montagne flubs the title of Ephron’s final essay collection, calling it I Can’t Remember Anything.

I wish Nora Ephron were here. She’d have the perfect comeback.

__

More on Ephron: Noreen Malone at New York magazine and Emily Yoffe atSlate (both via Nancy Nall).

 

Russell Hoban, 1925-2011

I was saddened to read of the death this week of Russell Hoban, the author of two of the most memorable, startlingly original works of fiction I’ve ever read: Riddley Walker and The Mouse and His Child.

Hoban was born in Philadelphia but lived for the last four decades in London; his later fiction was strongly influenced by English history and culture. (In the Acknowledgments to Riddley Walker he credits the novel’s genesis to his first visit to Canterbury Cathedral, on March 14, 1974. He began work on the novel exactly two months later; it took him five and a half years to complete.) As a young man Hoban worked as an advertising copywriter and illustrator, and the skills required for those jobs—word play, storytelling, visual acuity—surely helped shape his unique writing style.

The Mouse and His Child, published in 1967, may be the only children’s book in the English language with an epigraph by W.H. Auden. The story is archetypal: It’s Christmas, and a tramp rescues a broken and abandoned wind-up mouse-child pair from a trashcan. He sets them on a road, winds up the father, and issues a blessing: “Be tramps.” And that’s the last we hear from the tramp until the very end of the book. The rest of the novel tells of the mouse pair’s adventures as they seek to become “self-winding.” This being a fable, they meet an assortment of talking animals whose pronouncements are sometimes menacing, sometimes amusing, sometimes gnomic. (“‘Beaver plus Teeth times Gnaw times Time times Tree equals Treefall,’ said Muskrat.”)

With Riddley Walker (1980), we plunge into a darker, even more inventive world, several millennia in the future. Long ago, a nuclear holocaust devastated most of the planet, and the survivors have lost almost all knowledge of technology and culture. Do you ever wonder how English might look and sound a few thousand years from now? Here is the first sentence of the novel:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

I wrote about Riddley Walker in an October 2006 post about the books I can’t forget:

Speculative, post-apocalyptic fiction generally leaves me cold, but Riddley Walker is sui generis. It’s set in the nuclear winter of some future England, where humans and dogs are enemies. Twelve-year-old Riddley, newly orphaned, undertakes a coming-of-age quest in which Punch and Judy puppet shows—one of the most ancient of Anglo-Saxon theatrical traditions—figure prominently. But it’s the language, not the plot, that sets this novel apart. In Hoban’s vision, and Riddley's first-person narrative, the English language has become as deconstructed as society itself; England is “Inland,” America is “Eusa,”and the Archbishop of Canterbury (whose office has somehow survived) is “the Ardship of Cambry.”

According to the Times obituary, Hoban’s final novel, Soonchild, will be published early next year.

In 2006, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Jim Higgins wrote an appreciation of Riddley Walker. He includes it in his obituary of Hoban, published in his “Recommended Reading” blog.

P.S. Yes, I know that Hoban is better known in some quarters as the author of the Frances books for young children. I haven’t read those books, but this lovely appreciation of them by Lawrence Downes makes me want to.

R.I.P. William Safire, Edward Gelsthorpe

The American language lost two influential figures this month, one widely known among the reading public and the other known mostly to students of corporate America.

The passing on September 26 of William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter turned New York Times columnist, was promptly and thoroughly reported, as the deaths of media figures generally are. The Times obituary, by veteran reporter Robert McFadden (no mean wordslinger himself), included this vivid snapshot:

He was hardly the image of a button-down Times man: The shoes needed a shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He was tall but bent — a man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache coming on.

Safire was not, as McFadden reports, "a talented linguist"; he wasn't a linguist at all, but rather an enthusiastic amateur with a zest for word play and a lively interest in language. Of Safire's long-running On Language column, McFadden wrote:

There were columns on blogosphere blargon, tarnation-heck euphemisms, dastardly subjunctives and even Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bumps. And there were Safire “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

Although genuine linguists loved to criticize Safire (see Mr. Verb, Wishydig, and Language Hat), I think most would agree with their colleague Benjamin Zimmer that Safire "will be remembered fondly for his openness, humanity, and thoughtfulness."

I was a regular Safire reader, but I'd never heard of Edward Gelsthorpe, who died September 12, until I read his obituary. But I certainly know his work for companies like Bristol-Meyers, Ocean Spray, and Hunt-Wesson. You probably do, too. Here's one example from the Times obituary:

Mr. Gelsthorpe, a salesman turned marketer, was known for his ability to sniff out consumer desires and get new products into stores quickly. At Bristol-Meyers, for example, when an amateur inventor walked into the company’s Manhattan headquarters proposing that deodorant be applied like ink from a ballpoint pen, he bought her idea on the spot; Ban, introduced in 1955, became one of the company’s most successful toiletry products.

The Times obit doesn't mention it, but Gelsthorpe was also a pioneer of what's now called corporate social responsibility. In the early 1970s, while he was president of Hunt-Wesson, he launched a number of programs that were well ahead of their time, including a partnership with Ralphs Grocery Company in Southern California that helped poorer customers get the most food value from their limited budgets. He was also an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.

For language mavens and branding folks, however, Gelsthorpe's biggest contributions were Cran-Apple* (a juice blend invented to sell cranberries year round instead of only at Thanksgiving) and Manwich (Sloppy Joe sauce in a can).

The introduction of Ocean Spray's Cran-Apple in 1964 represented the first time cran- detached itself semantically from cranberry, paving the way for Cran-Grape, Cran-Raspberry, Cran-Pomegranate, and Crantini. Linguists eventually took notice of this phenomenon and dubbed it "cranberry morpheme," which got shortened to "cran-morph." In 2006, Benjamin Zimmer wrote about cran-morphs in Language Log:

The segment cran- in cranberry is opaque, though it looks like it's a modifier for the transparent morpheme -berry. Indeed, cranberry was only ever fully transparent in the Low German dialects from which the term was borrowed, where it was kraanbere or 'crane-berry.' Since English underwent the Great Vowel Shift, the semantic connection between the cognate forms cran- and crane has been lost. But the opacity of cran- has allowed for a reanalysis of the morpheme to "stand for" cranberry in new compounds like cran-grape and cran-raspberry. Such cran-morphing has yielded many productive suffixes in the 20th century: -burger, -(o)holic, -(o)rama, -(a)thon, -(o)mat, -(o)nomics, -gate, etc. (In the case of -burger, the new morpheme quickly became lexicalized as the standalone burger.)

As for Manwich, introduced in 1969 by Hunt-Wesson, it's both a cran-morph—-wich standing in for sandwich—and possibly the ur-man-word. Without Manwich, would we have mandles, manbags, mancession, Man Glaze, or manscaping? I suspect not.

The classic Manwich slogan, by the way, remains “A sandwich is a sandwich, but a Manwich is a meal.” I love this Manwich commercial:

__

* I was amused to notice that the Times's auto-link for the "Apple" in Cran-Apple goes to "more information about Apple Inc."

Donald Westlake, 1933-2008

I'm taking a brief break from my break to pass along the sad news that Donald Westlake, master of the comic crime novel, died of a heart attack on New Year's Eve. He was 75, and productive until the end. His next novel, Get Real, will be published in April July (update courtesy of crime-fiction writer and reviewer Sarah Weinman, who has posted an excellent appreciation of Westlake on her blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind).

Among writerly types, there are the tortured artistes, the painstaking craftsmen, and, all too rarely, the writers who seem to be having the time of their lives. Donald Westlake was in that third category. He made it look easy. He made it look like fun.

During his 50-year career, Westlake—using a variety of pen names—wrote more than 100 novels and five screenplays. Among the latter was his crackling screenplay for The Grifters, adapted from a Jim Thompson novel. His pseudonyms included Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt, and Edwin West. According to the New York Times obituary, Westlake "used different names in part to combat skepticism over his rapid rate of writing books, sometimes as many as four a year."

He wrote seven days a week, always using a manual typewriter. According to the Times obit, he kept four or five typewriters "and cannibalized their parts when any one broke, as the typewriter model was no longer manufactured."

I discovered Westlake years ago when I picked up Trust Me On This, his gleefully dark 1989 comedy set at a Florida tabloid newspaper with a strong resemblance to the National Enquirer. Since then I've read many (but by no means all) of his other books. I wrote about Westlake's splendid fictitious car names in this June 2007 post.

Westlake's publisher, Grand Central Publishing, is circulating other online tributes via a Twitter stream; they include posts at Bookgasm, Cheaper Ironies, Secret Dead Blog, and Lesa's Book Critiques.

Betty James, 1918-2008

In 1943, when her husband Richard asked her to name a toy he'd created from a piece of coiled metal, Betty James consulted a dictionary and discovered slinky, which means sleek and sinuous. Twenty-seven years later, after the Slinky toy had become a nationwide success, Richard James abandoned his family to join a religious cult in Bolivia. Left with six young children and "a business in shambles," according to her obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Betty James mortgaged her house and gambled everything she had to attend a toy show in New York in 1963. When orders began pouring in, she moved the James Industries factory to Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, near her Altoona home, and guided the company until she retired in 1998. Upon retiring she sold James Industries to Michigan-based Poof Products.

Betty James died in Philadelphia last Thursday at age 90.

The Slinky was named the Official State Toy of Pennsylvania in 2001. Last year, Wired Magazine named the Slinky toy No. 1 on its list of "10 Things We Love": "One patent, a 400-unit debut in a Philadelphia department store, and 300 million toys later, we still can't take our hands off the awesomely simple, mesmerizing little benders."

According to this Wikipedia article, "one or more Slinkys used together can form the basis of a shortwave radio antenna." The Slinky can also be used as a solenoid to induce a magnetic field.

Watch a Slinky TV commercial from the 1960s and sing along (EARWORM ALERT):

Who walks the stair without a care/and makes the happiest sound? /Bounce up and down, just like a clown/ Everyone knows it's Slinky!

(Hat tip: Judith K.) 

UPDATE: And speaking of walking the stair (CAT VIDEO ALERT).

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

I am mourning David Foster Wallace, one of the most brilliant writers of his generation, who hanged himself Friday in his Claremont, California, home. His wife discovered his body.

I've never read Wallace's epic novel, Infinite Jest, but I was a huge fan of his essays, which I read in Harper's magazine and in a book-length collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The title essay, which recounts Wallace's experiences on a weeklong Caribbean cruise aboard the m.v. Zenith (which Wallace, naturally, rechristened the Nadir)—surely one of the most improbable pairings of subject and chronicler in the history of journalism—delivers in digest form all the stuff that Wallace fans adore (and Wallace detractors hate): the dizzying alternation between baroque elegance and pop vernacular, the curious punctuation, the obsessively observant eye, the morose yet hilarious self-awareness. And the footnotes—my God, the footnotes. One hundred thirty-seven of them in 95 pages, including one (#32, if you want to look it up) that spans four pages.

And prose like this:

I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as "Mon" in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced and a tropical moon that looked more like a sort of obscenely large and dangling lemon than like the good old stony U.S. moon I'm used to.

I have (very briefly) joined a Conga Line.

Nau Is the New Then

Eco-sportswear "concept" Nau issues a going-out-of-business manifesto:

In the current highly risk-averse capital market, we simply could not raise the necessary funds to continue to move forward. We believe this is not so much a reflection of the viability of our business, but the result of an unfortunate confluence of events. Just as we could not have predicted the sudden groundswell of environmental consciousness that blossomed at the time we launched our business, we did not foresee the current crisis in the capital markets. At this time, investors are loath to invest in anything; especially, it appears, a company like Nau that has the audacity to challenge conventional paradigms of what a business could be.

And much, much more in this vein.

I never cared for Nau's clothing--too somber and space-agey--but I do regret the passing of a company that knew the correct spelling of loath (adjective).

Everything on the site is half-price.

(According to a Cool Hunting report from upbeat pre-launch days--about 20 months ago--"Nau" means "welcome" in Maori.)

Via Wardrobe 911.