Arranged by Elaine Fine

Tonight on PBS’s Great Performances , a Vienna Philharmonic Sommernachtskonzert [Summer Night Concert] that includes Elaine’s orchestral arrangement of Florence Price’s “Adoration.”

Wie cool ist das denn?

A previous post
The Vienna Philharmonic to play Florence Price’s “Adoration” (arr. Elaine Fine) (With links that tell the “Adoration” story)

Stenography

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Here’s an article about Dickens and stenography, complete with charts of arbitrary characters from Thomas Gurney’s Brachygraphy (1825), the manual Dickens would have used: Hugo Bowles’s “Stenography and Orality in Dickens: Rethinking the Phonographic Myth” (Dickens Studies Annual ). Alas, no arbitrary characters for expectation and disadvantageous , which may be Dickens’s inventions.

You can see the 1778 edition of Brachygraphy (with the first chapter of Genesis and other texts in shorthand) via HathiTrust.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

MarkText

[Click for a larger view.]

“A true WYSIWYG editor — your Markdown transforms in place the moment you type. No split view, no toggling”: MarkText is a free Markdown editor for macOS, Windows, and Linux. With many themes. That’s Everforest Dark above.

I’m loyal to iA Writer and Byword, but I’m always happy to find a stylish Markdown app.

[Markdown is several thousand times easier to learn than stenography.]

SHAME

A new mnemonic: Superior, Huron, America, Michigan, Erie. SHAME.

*

I see now that other people thought of this mnemonic before I did. I hereby charge them with anticipatory plagiarism.

Oceans 47

The current occupant, just now:

“So if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean, so maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change ’em both.”

The only question in response: why do things like this to an ally? Because, he said, Canadians are “nasty people.”

I wish someone had pressed: but why oceans? Surely they matter to many other nations too. When you will be making these decisions? And how will you choose the names? They can’t both be the American Ocean. And why haven’t you renamed the Strait of Hormuz?

I think journalists would do well to ask straight-faced questions about these absurdities. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, “Don’t hide the madness.”

[Context: the occupant has renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America.]

Car bars

Elaine and I were headed toward Staples when we noticed two women parked in front of the store, struggling to fit a swiveling task chair into the back of a BMW. “Do you need a hand?” I asked, having had some experience fitting similar chairs into similar spaces.

They did need a hand, but not in the way I had assumed. They had the rear seats folded down and were trying to figure out how to remove the bar behind those seats so that they could slide the chair all the way in. One was looking at the BMW owner’s manual, which offered the tersest guidance: “Press the release button.” Which would be where, exactly? Four of us looked at the bar, both ends, and none of us could figure it out.

A fifth person was on her way into Staples. I figured I'd ask if she knew how to remove the bar. She had no idea. A man was on his way into Staples. He too had no idea. We all stood around.

It was sheer luck that one of BMW women did something — what? — and the bar popped out, and two of us pushed the chair in.

This afternoon Elaine and I looked at our new vehicle, a hybrid Toyota RAV4, to see if we could figure out its bar. And we did, but it’s a much less intuitive bar than the bar in our now-gone 2010 Prius. The RAV4 bar is called a luggage cover, though I think that name should more properly apply to the cover that pulls out from the bar to hide worldly possessions.

I like our RAV4 — a lot, really a lot — but everything about it is less intuitive. I’ve yet to look up the Hold button in the thick manual, even thicker, I think, than the BMW’s.

[RAV4 ? It means “Recreational Active Vehicle with 4-wheel drive.” Apple Dictation and Slide to Type both rendered the name correctly the first time out. God knows what a RAV4 will cost with higher tariffs.]

HCR on Dolly Parton

“‘Find out who you are and do it on purpose. And do it with purpose,’ Parton was famous for saying”: the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American is all about Dolly Parton.

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library

Dolly Parton’s family requests, instead of flowers, donations to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a literacy initiative that provides a registered child with a book a month, from birth to the age of five.

Parton started the Imagination Library to honor her father, Robert Lee Parton Sr., who could neither read nor write. The program has given away more than 332 million books.

A related post
Dolly Parton on writing materials

[Yes, our household has donated.]

Dolly Parton visits Captain Kangaroo

Elaine remembered this appearance, from October 27, 1976.

I had forgotten what a strange show Captain Kangaroo was. If you don’t have the patience for the marching band bit, Dolly arrives at 2:54 and prepares to sing “Cracker Jack” at 10:18.

Dolly Parton (1946–2026)

“She was, quintessentially, a uniter of people. In 2019, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton”: from the Times obituary (gift links).

Dolly Parton was a force for good in the world. I wish that I weren’t sharing this news.