Jacques Pépin pays tribute to Julia Child

As part of Heather Cox Richardson’s 25 to 250 series.

I always like seeing Julia Child or Jacques Pépin cook. Watching M. Pépin in my grownuphood gave me confidence to try a few more things in cooking.

Did you know that Julia Child once visited the Martin family of TV fame: Ruth, Paul, Timmy, and Lassie? She did — at least in my imagination she did. The story is here: “Bon Appétit!”

[It’s a good story.]

Recently updated

Is this a cigar which I see before me? Now with an explanation of sorts.

“He doesn’t want to do the job”

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.]

Robert Caro, interviewed on C-SPAN

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)

Tyler Austin Harper, ex-prof

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.

A shoe shine boy

[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)

Word of the day: pothook

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 buildings resemble in their monotony the marks made by a boy learning the rudiments of handwriting, practicing the same stroke over and over. And those marks resemble the hooks suspended over a fireplace. The houses resemble the marks that resemble the hooks.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

What’s under there?

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.

*

The bulge has attracted international attention.

Diners face off

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)

Who was?

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.

See also Black Jeopardy Misses, a YouTube compendium of similar fails. For instance:

The category: That Is the Question. The answer, for $800:

In 1851 in Akron, Sojourner Truth delivered a speech called this 4-word rhetorical question

No one buzzed.

And I’m reminded of a moment in the documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine (dir. Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, 1982), in which Hoyt Fuller tells James Baldwin about a moment from the classroom, when he asked a student to read a quiz question aloud:

“And she says, ‘I have no idea who Malcolm Ten was.’”