FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: I find myself in need of a new desktop computer, since my Atari 800 is beginning to show signs of age. But I’m a bit bewildered by the choices when it comes to operating systems. How do I decide which kind of computer to buy? —Sincerely, Fred, Who Doesn’t Leave the House Much.
Dear Sir: There are three major operating systems for desktop computers today, and which one you choose depends on what you plan to do with the computer. To help you make your choice, Dr. Boli has compiled a handy table that shows the most common uses of each operating system.
| MacOS | Linux | Windows |
| Publishing | Video editing | Installing Windows updates |
| Graphic design | Image editing | |
| Image editing | Writing | |
| Writing | Software development | |
| General office work | General office work |
SHELF TAG…
…at a local store:
SMUG HUMILITY, OR HUMBLE SMUGNESS.
But this paradox is the world’s way of providing us with a few great artists. The truly great artists are the ones who absorb these two opposite lessons. It seems that a great artist requires humility and smugness in equal proportion.
Let us imagine for our purposes a dedicated and talented (but unfortunately fictional) artist, whom we shall call Joe Artist. Joe is just like all the other dishwashers who call themselves artists, except in one particular: Joe really is a genius. He paints in a unique style all his own: the best description of it is rococo cubism. When asked for an “artist statement” by one of the few galleries that would consent to exhibit his work, he was at a loss for words: he expresses himself in paint, not in writing. He finally, after many abandoned attempts, described himself as a representational painter who paints pictures of things that cannot exist but ought to.
Joe has never had much material success as an artist. He continues to exist because he is humble enough to realize that the world does not require his services as a painter, but it will pay him for washing dishes. This is the necessary humility that keeps him in the dish pit so he can remain alive and continue to paint.
But in the painting itself, Joe is confident past the point of arrogance. Over and over gallery-owners and art-show gatekeepers have told him that he needs to simplify his style radically, and that he could get into prestigious exhibitions if he would just put a political message about the oppression of his people (the name “Artist” is a corrupted spelling of a Basque surname) in his paintings, preferably in block capital letters. Joe knows that those people are wrong, because he knows that his art is right. He cannot take suggestions from anybody, because his art already is what it is meant to be, and a great artist cannot deliberately make his art worse. This may seem intolerable smugness, but it is necessary smugness. His certainty that he is producing great art is what makes Joe’s art great: if he ever lost that certainty, he would follow advice and perhaps prosper on the art-show circuit, and his art would be just like everybody else’s.
Humility and smugness are equally necessary to Joe’s continued existence as a great artist. But what happens if either bubble is burst?
If he loses the smugness, the most likely outcome is that Joe will cease to be an artist altogether. There are better ways of making a living than by washing dishes, but they may require a certain dedication that would preclude the dedication to art that keeps Joe painting. On the other hand, if Joe gives in to the temptation to listen to the gallery owners and art-show committees, he may in fact find that it is possible to make a living as an artist, as long as he is content to be a bad artist. Either way, losing the certainty that his art is right and necessary would be a mortal wound to his art.
If Joe loses his humility, the most likely outcome is that he loses everything else as well. He will decide that his art is so essential to the world that it ought to be his full-time occupation. He will not be able to make his art a paying job, because he will not make the necessary compromises, so he will become bitter and be driven to intoxication, possibly crime, and almost certainly early death. He may produce a few great works of art to be appreciated by future generations, but there will not be many, and the world will lose all the greater works he would have painted in his maturity.
So if you are an artist, and you find that the world is not rewarding you according to your merit, but you have accepted that you need to do some menial work to support your art—well then, you may be a great artist after all. Most likely you are not, but you have raised your chances.
DR. BOLI’S NEW TELEPHONE MESSAGE.
NOW IN PRESS.
The Intoxiad, by Irving Vanderblock-Wheedle. “Beggars description”—Drunken Poets’ Quarterly. 8vo, 1,327 pp.
BUMPER STICKER.
WHY HOMER NEVER SOUNDS RIGHT IN HEXAMETER.
You, the reader, already know the answer to that question. Dr. Boli could argue against it, and he will, in one of those periodic essays that will send most of you off to Instagram to look at pictures of birds.
There is a fundamental difference between Greek or Latin versification on the one hand and English versification on the other. The rhythm of English poetry is based on accent; there is no such thing as “quantity” in English. Like almost any definite statement about almost any human language, this one must be qualified at once. In ordinary speech, different syllables have different durations: it takes much longer to say “snakes” than it does to say “at,” though the dictionary will tell you they are both words of one syllable. But there is no regular pattern to these differences, no mathematical formula that would create a rhythm and make them a suitable basis of meter in English.
In Greek or Latin poetry, on the other hand, quantity rules. Accent is irrelevant to the meter. The rhythm is made with long and short syllables; and the rule of the grammarians, in which they doubtless followed the longstanding practice of the bards, was that a long syllable was equal to two short syllables.
The basic unit of dactylic hexameter is the dactyl—a long syllable followed by two short syllables. Since a long syllable is twice the length of a short one, that gives us a “foot” of four beats, taking a short syllable as one beat. Other kinds of feet will appear in a line of epic poetry: the spondee, for example, which is two long syllables. But here again the foot is four beats: each of the two long syllables is equivalent to two short syllables.
Taking into account the cæsura, which is a pause in the middle of the line, and another pause at the end of the line, a classical epic marches along in stately 4/4 time. A good poet can do wonderful things to speed up or slow down that meter, to make it as ponderous as death or as light as children playing on the beach. But the dominant effect is serious and dignified.
But what happens when we try to haul that meter into English? We mark the lines the same way: macron, breve, breve. But now the marks indicate accented and unaccented syllables, not long and short ones. As music—and epic poetry is meant to be sung by a bard smitin’ ’is bloomin’ lyre—it is a completely different thing. We may call it dactylic hexmeter, but the dactyls are not the same dactyls. Where the Greek and Latin poems marched in stately 4/4 time, our English hexameters skip along in triplets. And that is an effect that in English suggests lightness and frivolity. An English-speaker who hears verse bouncing along in triplets immediately thinks, “There was a young man from Nantucket…”
To Dr. Boli’s ear, the only successful work in dactylic hexameter in English is Longfellow’s Evangeline, which is successful precisely because Longfellow applied a great deal of poetic ingenuity to the problem of not letting his hexameters skip along like limericks.
This is why the successful translators of Homer into English have always chosen iambic feet as the basis of their meter—just as our native English-speaking poets have always done when the subject is a serious one. Most of them reach for iambic pentameter, the meter of the Canterbury Tales and Hamlet and Paradise Lost—though perhaps the greatest English translator of Homer, George Chapman, set his translation of the Iliad in heptameter, or what an Elizabethan would have straightforwardly called fourteeners. The fourteeners, counting a pause at the end of the line, restore the 4/4 rhythm of the original, and perhaps that is the secret of Chapman’s miraculous effect: he seems to have written the Iliad himself rather than translated it.
So now you understand why dactylic hexameter can never satisfy us as an English epic meter, and why translators who are real poets—Emily Wilson, Alexander Pope, George Chapman—have always chosen iambs. The next time you translate Homer or Virgil, you will do the same.
If you would like to spend an afternoon comparing translations, we have extensive pages for Homer and Virgil in the Eclectic Library.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
THE OTHER SIDE OF HOLLYWOOD.
And even then, there was no guarantee that the artists who had made a profitable hit last year would do the same next year. The public demanded new movies, but new movies were risky by definition. Your contract players would act their hearts out, your cinematographers would pick out every detail in glorious Technicolor, your director would time each scene to the second—and yet the public might not like the movie after all.
But then there was the other side of Hollywood—the side you could rely on, the side where profits were guaranteed. This was the side of Hollywood where all the same talent and all the same technical wizardry that went into making this year’s Oscar-bait could be hired for a feature-length Technicolor musical fantasy about Westinghouse appliances. And here it is, thanks to the Library of Congress and the Internet Archive:
Just watch the credits—you don’t have to watch the whole hour and a half. The credits alone will drop your jaw six inches.
You can see the attraction for the studios. There was no worry about whether box-office receipts would pay for the production, because there was no box office. The corporate client was the audience, and the price was agreed on beforehand. This movie would make a profit, guaranteed.
And think how much more exciting it was to be an appliance salesman in those days. These days, the most exciting thing that ever happens in a salesman’s life is when some YouTube microcelebrity with a channel about different ways to cook broccoli shows up for a book-signing at the Best Buy. But in 1952, Westinghouse salesmen all over the country got to sit down in screening rooms and see the top talent in Hollywood giving voices to the appliances they peddled every day. It must have made a difference in the salesman’s morale when he could imagine every dishwasher as Maureen O’Sullivan.
The Internet Archive has a collection of more than 24,000 “Ephemeral Films.” Most of them were ephemeral for good reason, but every once in a while we run across a treasure. Perhaps Ellis in Freedomland is not exactly a treasure. But it would be hard to think of a general-release film more beautifully photographed than American Look, a 1958 widescreen Technicolor spectacular about the marvelous world of industrial design. “Improved styling constantly adds to the ease and grace and gaiety of American living,” says the narrator, and it is a tribute to the work of the photographers that we believe every word he says.