Senator Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia), yesterday in Atlanta:
“And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs, and trades stocks. You see, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”[My punctuation.]
It’s a great ninety minutes: Peter Slen interviews Robert Caro about his Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson biographies.
When will the final volume of the Johnson biography be out? “Bad question.”
A fun moment: the bookcases.
A chilling revelation, in some discussion of Johnson’s and Robert Kennedy’s hatred of each another: when Robert Kennedy was shot, Johnson was up all night, asking his aides, “Is he dead yet?”
Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)
Three samples.
From “Why I Quit the Tenure Track: The Insufferable Hypocrisy of Elite Academia” (The Atlantic , gift link):
I’d never had great enthusiasm for identity politics; I’d been a socialist since my early 20s, and it had generally been my experience that liberals were as eager to talk about race as they were uneager to talk about class. Yet I also assumed that conservative complaints about “wokeness,” a term just coming into vogue as a pejorative, were essentially Fox News hysteria. Until I got to Bates [College, in Lewiston, Maine], I had little reason to suspect that they held any merit.From “The Confessions of Tyler Austin Harper,” an interview (The Chronicle of Higher Education :
It really was being at Bates and slowly realizing that what we might call an intersectional version of progressivism was just a grand charade to mask real political and economic problems at both Bates specifically and higher education writ large. I did the work. I read a lot of alternative pedagogy. I quit using grades in my classes. I agreed with some of these critiques, and I still agree with some of them. But it became apparent that it was quite convenient to latch on to these things rather than confront the simmering class warfare on campus.From “The Truths That Failed Jason Arday” (The Atlantic , gift link):
To be a Black person in elite institutions, and particularly in elite academia, is to have the standards simultaneously set too low and too high: too low because only a Black person with Arday’s dubious qualifications and seemingly invented biography could have been elevated to the top of the mountain in academia and publishing; and too high because only a Black person could have been pushed off that mountain with such nakedly racist enthusiasm, his tumbling fall so ruthlessly documented, analyzed, and cheered. When a famous white man errs, people tend to rightly understand his mistakes or transgressions as an individual’s missteps. When a famous Black man does, the errors are typically turned into spectacle, characterized as proof of the inferiority, suspected all along, of his race.I look forward to reading much more from Tyler Austin Harper.
[Outside 5117 4th Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
He appears in yesterday’s post. I didn’t want him to be overlooked.
An outtake shows a shoe-repair shop at no. 5117, offering “Ladies and Gents Shoe Shine Inside.” An earlier photograph, I’d assume, before a radio-repair shop took over the premises. Sitting across from what was once shoes , perhaps this kid was looking to capitalize on people’s remembrance of shines past. Or perhaps he was just counting on foot traffic from the subway entrance and exit.
I can’t write this post without pointing to Duke Ellington’s beautiful rendition of Saul Chaplin and Sammy Cahn’s “Shoe Shine Boy”. With Lawrence Brown (trombone), Barney Bigard (clarinet), and a vocal by Ivie Anderson. Is it really ninety years old? It is.
Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
It appears in a metaphor atop a metaphor, in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield . The narrator describes the houses on Tommy Traddles’s street:
They were all built on one monotonous pattern, and looked like the early copies of a blundering boy who was learning to make houses, and had not yet got out of his cramped brick and mortar pothooks.The Oxford English Dictionary to the rescue. A pothook is
a hook suspended over a fireplace on which a pot or kettle may be hung.But also
a curved or hooked stroke made with the pen, esp. as a component of an unfamiliar or unintelligible script or when learning to write; (also) a crooked character, a scrawl.So the pothooks in Dickens’s sentence are the marks made by a boy learning the rudiments of handwriting, practicing a stroke over and over. Those marks resemble the hooks suspended over a fireplace. And the houses resemble the marks that resemble the hooks in their sameness.
Aaron Rupar posted some strange footage and asked “Seriously, what is going on with Trump’s rear end here? It looks like he has some sort of contraption back there.”
Whatever is back there, there also appears to be some sort of contraption on his legs as well. Watch as he walks toward the crowd: you can see his pants legs riding up at about eight inches above his shoes. And watch as he ascends the stairs: his pants legs bulge in an odd way below the knee. There’s something in there, I suspect, likely an exoskeletal device to help with walking. I found this one at Amazon. And who knows what else is under those pants?
I don’t believe in making a joke of anyone’s effort to retain their mobility. But there’s something to be said when the White House (or what’s left of it) insists that the current occupant is astonishingly fit for the office.
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The bulge has attracted international attention.
Count ’em. One diner:
[5117 4th Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
And right across the street, a second:
[5116 4th Avenue, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
Look closely to see the Y and D design next to the Yankee Diner’s entrance, “Colored Revue,” “Scandinavian Home Cooking,” and many other details.
Both diners are long gone. But the ghost of the Yankee Diner can be seen in no. 5117’s 1980s tax photograph.
Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
I caught by chance a minute of Jeopardy! yesterday. New episode? Old? No idea. Here’s what got my attention:
The category: American Poetry. The answer, for $800:
Poems by him include “Crowing Hen Blues,” "Po’ Boy Blues,” & “The Weary Blues”No one buzzed.
In 1851 in Akron, Sojourner Truth delivered a speech called this 4-word rhetorical questionNo one buzzed.
“And she says, ‘I have no idea who Malcolm Ten was.’”
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, is “Extremely” (18-A, six letters) difficult. I left 1-A, eight letters, “Top drawer” alone and began with 60-A, eight letters, “Siege that named an SUV.” How do I know that?
A source of unhappiness in this puzzle: 24-A, six letters, “Cesky apoštol.” Printing the puzzle to fill a letter-sized page left apoštol looking more like apositol. So I looked online and found Český apoštol and figured it out. And then I discovered that the free online versions of the puzzle — 1, 2 — render the clue minus the mark.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
2-A, eight letters, “Greek who wrote Theory of the Passions.” Odysseus?
9-D, eleven letters, “Cups of tea.” Not sure about this one. Something can have be your 9-D without being your cup of tea.
12-D, six letters, “Luke’s unfortunate news.” I had to drop my certainty that this clue was a cryptic.
17-A, eight letters, “Spoils.” Just a cool word.
22-A, three letters, “Key duplication.” Now that I understand it, I still think it’s ridiculous.
24-D, eleven letters, “Overly optimistic.” Reviving an old-timey phrase.
32-A, seven letters, “Guess who?” Fun.
35-D, eight letters, “Posters, postcards, pamphlets, etc.” One of my cups of tea.
39-D, seven letters, “Talk over?” Clever.
48-A, four letters, “Word from the French for ‘small and detailed.’” Who knew?
My favorite in this puzzle: 27-A, eleven letters, “Show-off.” For a moment, I’m in The Honeymooners
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
[A Zits cigar, modified.]
I decided to make the cigar in today’s Zits look more cigar-like. But my son Ben went me one better. Well done, son.
As Ben reminds me, Walt Duncan has sometimes been seen with a cigar, as in this 1999 strip.
A related post
Is this a cigar that I see before me? (Today’s Zits )
[Post title with apologies to Sigmund Freud.]
