Women and Their House Plants, or, The Truth about House Plants

As I will shortly be the only member of my immediate family to have any form of garden, I have been examining the various gardening texts that have guided my parents over the years. I believe that I will keep a slender item, originally purchased for 69 cents from the IGA in Normal, Illinois, which features a cover shot of a skier surveying a window full of potted hyacinths, tulips, daffodils, and other unseasonable blossoms. The initial text informs the reader that "Growing plants indoors ever since pioneer days, and even more so in this twentieth century, has provided millions of people with a rewarding and satisfying hobby." We learn that "with all the labor-saving devices modern woman has much more time to devote to their care." Subsequently, we are told that "Most women are far too kind to their house plants and think they have to have water every day."

As a friend of mine likes to say, "You get the picture."

On Love and Sex

More from the "howlers" folder:

Women are one of the habits man has learned to enjoy.
A man must sell insurance different from the way he sells his love.
He satirizes a virgin wrench.
I like to go steady, because then I am always ready if anything big comes up.
When a boy is deeply involved with a girl, it becomes necessary to motivate her.
We are plagued by the eroticism of the soil.
"I am newly married and the question that confronts me now is 'Should I wear my rah-rahs to school?'"
Pepys and his wife often enjoyed erotic dishes and often dined out.
How much fun will a housewife be on her second honeymoon if all she does is worry about her children.
Marriage consoling organizations are established by churches and cities in order to save marriages 'on the rocks'

The (Un)reasonable Man

More from the "Howlers" folder:

The reasonable man goes through life in a comma.
An unreasonable man is one who fertilizes the world.
Self-scented is the name for the unreasonable man.
An unreasonable man is always a temtuous lover.
Society, a group of unreasonable men, let minority groups be scrapecoats.
The unreasonable man spends his money wisely before he earns it.

Howlers

My Sibling and I have been going through our father's papers with the intention of preparing them for archiving at his various universities. A folder entitled "Howlers" has surfaced. On literature:

The Rape of the Pope by Locke
Peachum is a downright scongrel.
Don Whan was a great lover.
Catch Her in the Rye
As the story opens, the heroin is seen...
Stephen discovers that Absalom has fathered an illegitimate child by the woman he married.
English took into its whore-house bed of words...
Life here can, as Shakespeare said, be compared to a baseball game.
I would agree with the author if he would only define is terms with my train of thought.
If it weren't for crime and violence, even the Bible would be reduced to a small pamphlet.
Stories of crime and violence take us away from the harsh realities of life.
The poem is a good example of the old carpet diem theme.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales would have been dull if he had left out the stories.
Hamlet helps me to cathart.

Such Dreams as These

I have always tried to remember my dreams. Sometimes I'm good at it, other times not. Sometimes I only remember when I realize that a particular dream is familiar and that I've been in that dream or dream-territory before.
Sometimes, however, I simply wonder what on earth is going on in my head. The other night, for example, I began by dreaming that I had succeeded in flying to Sydney for what was evidently to be a vacation. Fine, I've always wanted to go to Australia and New Zealand. But rather than do anything particularly interesting, the said dream took me first to some kind of mall where I attempted to find food (!) and then next thing I knew I was asking a class of students how many of them knew that historically, artists usually originated in artist families.
If I get to Sydney before reaching my dotage, these are not activities that are truly high on my list of must-dos.
As if that weren't enough of the absurdly mundane, last night I awakened (not for the only time, I regret to say) from a not-very-sound sleep from sheer astonishment at what I had just dreamt. And what had I dreamt? That the University of Pittsburgh Slavic Department had 6000 graduate students!
The Slavic Department, while a very good one, actually has somewhere in the low two digits when it comes to grad students. No wonder I was incredulous at what I had dreamt.

More Silly Titles

A friend and I were perusing the "bizarre things" section of this blog the other day, and I was reminded of my various forays into the invention of book titles (for books no one is likely ever to write). In the interest of putting off completion of my taxes, I offer some more of these:

Horatio Alger Smiles at the Apocalypse
Rhythms and Rampages
The Good Plight
Mordants and Their Uses
Enjoying Your Hot Flashes
Table-Rapping for Beginners
Ectoplasm in My Soup
Prior Complaints
Witchcraft and Banana Splits
Night Falls on Three Ladies
Niagara Falls on Crocodile Rock
A Gentle Paranoia
Poisons I Have Known
The Architecture of Modern Kennebunkport
Dick and Jane File Their Income Tax

Translations

In the course of mining Angelo Ripellino's Magic Prague (in English translation) for writers' descriptions of Prague streets, I came across the following passage about Zlatá ulička (Golden Lane), which rather took my fancy:

“A narrow, winding lane with crenels, a snail’s path barely wide enough for one’s shoulders to pass. I am standing in front of a row of small houses, none of which is taller than myself. Were I to stretch out my arm I could touch the roofs. Here during the Middle Ages disciples set the philosophers’ stone aglow and poisoned moon beams.”

While I had to think a moment to identify "crenels," this seemed worth hunting down in the original, Gustav Meyrink's Golem.
With considerable difficulty (earlier I had intended to blog about my struggles with the endnotes to Magic Prague, which use a lot of op. cit. and are not aided by a bibliography) I determined that the edition of Golem used was from 1976. I proceeded to order the 1976 Dover edition from a library in this state, which proved to have an emendation of Madge Pemberton's 1928 translation.
The text there, however, read:

“A little twisty, twirly alley, broken here and there by arbitrary loopholes--it might almost be called a spiral passage, scarce broad enough to admit the width of a man--and I stood before a row of diminutive houses, not one of which exceeded my own height. I had only to stretch up my arm to touch their roofs.
It was the Street of the Alchemists, where the so-called ‘wise men’ of the past had evolved their formulas for the philosopher’s stone, brewing their concoctions in the watches of the night, poisoning with their noxious fumes the sweet rays of the moon.”

I had to examine these for awhile to feel certain that it was indeed the same passage, but had to conclude that it was. Not, however, the same translation! And which of these was more faithful to the original German, pray tell?
A little digging around in Internet Archive brought forth the original edition published by Kurt Wolff in 1915. The said text is on 226 and reads:

“Ein schmales, gewundenes Gässchen mit Schiessscharten, ein Schneckengang, kaum breit genug, die Schultern durchzulassen--und ich stand vor einer Reihe von Häuschen, keines höher als ich.
Wenn ich den Arm ausstreckte, konnte ich auf die Dächer greifen.
Ich war in die ‘Goldmachergasse’ geraten, wo im Mittelalter die alchimistischen Adepten den Stein der Weisen geglüht und die Mondstrahlen vergiftet haben.”

Well, even though it was written in Fraktur, the font was quite legible and indeed despite my limited German I could understand it pretty well without resorting to the dictionary. But for the heck of it I decided (given the divergent translations above) to plug it into Google Translate. Google Translate actually did a pretty good job on its own, but it now also lets you see if you'd prefer a different meaning or synonym for a given word, so I touched up a few things--"streets" to "alleys" ("alley" in the singular wasn't on the list), "worm gear" to "snail passage," "more" to "higher," "which" to "where," "adept" to "adepts" and "poisoning" to "poisoned":

"A narrow, winding alleys with gun ports, a snail passage, barely wide enough to admit the shoulders -. And I stood in front of a row of houses, none higher than me.
If I stretched out my arm, I could access the roof.
I had fallen into the 'Goldmacher street', where have in the middle Ages, the alchemical adepts annealed the philosopher's stone, and poisoned the moonbeams."

While there are still a few edits I'd choose to make on this (for example "crenels" is decidedly more suitable than "gun ports" since crenellation can be purely decorative, or meant for arrows rather than guns), it's obvious that the translation in Magic Prague is much more faithful than the Pemberton translation. I have no clue who did that translation, though, so I suppose that if I quote this passage, I'll combine the one from Magic Prague with my editing of Google Translate's version.
Life ain't simple around here.