[From the dowdy world: a voice speaks.]
“Quiet, fellas — it’s long distance.”
Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Overheard
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
View Profile
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Who are we as a country?”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
Search this blog
Creative Commons
StatCounter
Subscribe
Click to subscribe in a reader.
Top twenty tags
Words to live by
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
#1 hit
In memory of
Blog Archive
-
▼
2017
(929)
-
▼
July
(81)
- Current events
- Jeanne Moreau (1928–2017)
- A good skate
- “Government schools”
- The supply closet
- Companions
- New York attitudes
- Zippy Automat
- One vote and two other votes
- June Foray (1917–2017)
- Scaramucci speaks
- My 2¢, or $50
- The Holiday version
- Being transgender and serving with honor
- Flaunt for flout (PBS, sheesh)
- Local man voices criticism
- Snoopy TV
- An Eagle Scout’s response
- A Kafka bridge
- A Kafka highway
- Another take on Jared Kushner
- Close reading
- Some somes
- Some prepositions
- A shopping list
- Twelve movies
- “Heavy, black pencils”
- Aeschylus and criminal justice
- Jacket in the foreground
- From Sir Thomas Browne
- Royal Motel
- Oil and reading habits
- To and too
- ”There’s no excuse for bad copyediting”
- More Vivian Maier
- Against “Jane”
- Watch-band calendar
- Desk, Kafkaesque
- “It’s getting kind of crowded in here”
- Another modest proposal
- A job listing
- A farewell to arm
- Crusty diction
- Photobucket fail
- Disable autoplay videos in Safari
- Martin Landau (1928–2017)
- Bob Wolff (1920–2017)
- Hal Fryar (1927–2017)
- Long-distance
- iOS Dictation fail
- Thank you, Judge Watson
- Relationship advice
- Some seventeenth-century prose
- DQ Breeze
- For the syntax-minded
- Trump[,] Jr.
- Wise words on W. 12th
- Overheard
- Saving Western civ
- Things I learned on my summer vacation
- An “over and over”
- Another shoe
- Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust
- OED Word of the Day: madeleine
- The Post New York Post
- Times as Post
- “A Billionaire for the Rest of Us”
- A social network
- Domestic comedy
- Budget!
- Zippy fedora
- Wise words on Fulham Road
- Ballpark design
- A sardine cartoon
- A voter-suppression effort, rerouted
- Brief Interviews with an apology
- Bryan Garner on rules and writing
- A thought for these days
- The Fourth
- A Chris Christie “Footprints”
- “Oração”
-
▼
July
(81)
favorite posts
- Against “deep reading”
- Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
- At the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel
- Being wrong about beauty
- Bobbing for apples
- “Bon Appétit!”
- “The Case of the Purloined Prairie”
- ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems
- “The ’Clipse”
- Couric and Palin and Orwell
- Digital naïfs
- Donald Trump’s spelling
- Ebinger’s
- Ellington for beginners
- “Extra credit?”
- Five desks
- Five pens
- Fluke life
- The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else
- Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti
- Hoagies, pizza, and English studies
- Homeric blindness in “colledge”
- How to Write a Sentence
- Imaginary liner notes
- Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
- Invitation to a dance
- Is there a pencil in The House?
- John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat
- A Kerouac notebook page
- The kitchen shink [sic]
- Klenosky!
- “Make My Jotter Quit!”
- Lady Elaine’s can
- Mysteries of the tollbooth
- National’s et cetera
- Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado
- Obama revisions
- Obama thoughts
- On “On the New Literacy”
- On “Politics and the English Language”
- “On the Road”
- The Oteris and Marty
- The other little book
- Out of the past
- Peppa Pig and the Brontës
- Phones Are For People
- Politics and theory
- “The Poet”
- Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things
- P.S. 131
- Pullum on Strunk and White
- Re: the Beloit Mindset List
- Some have gone and some remain
- “The Spokesmen”
- Sports Illustrated and Proust
- The Springfield Daily Gazette
- That (in)famous line
- Things I learned on my summer vacation
- Van Dyke Parks in Chicago
- W(h)ither grammar
- What I hear in “Walk Away Renee”
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
comments: 4
This post reminded me of a passage in the book "Art and Adventure of Beekeeping" by Ormond and Harry Aebi (1975), which is just about the best book on the use of observation and intuition to solve problems I've read.
In it Ormond Aebi recounts a incident in the 1920s, as a small boy, growing up in rural Orgeon. It involved handling poison oak while trying to get a glimpse of bees constructing their nest and the subsequent rash. It’s worth quoting in full.
"I sat in misery and cried. Mother tried every remedy she knew but none gave me any relief. At last one morning she decided to telephone long distance to Grandmother who might know a cure. There was no charge for that particular long distance telephone call in those those days. However, Mother had to wait until all lines were clear the entire distance before a call could go through and that might be from ten minutes to three days---too often the latter. There was no way to tell when the distant lines would be clear, so Mother had to keep trying. She got her call through to Grandmother in about ten hours. This was surprisingly soon as we were on a seventeen-party line and some of the farther lines had as many as twenty subscribers. As the telephone was an easily accessible news media, everyone 'rubbered' when the telephone rang. Rubbernecks lowered the electrical power in the telephone lines forcing Mother to shout her questions into the mouthpiece and Grandmother to yell on her end of the line in reply.
Everyone along the line knew that little Ormond had poison oak and heard Grandmother's cure. Before she hung up Mother told Grandmother that she would phone again in three days sometime around noon to let her know if I was well. This alerted everyone to keep off the lines and listen for Grandmother's three long rings and two short ones as Central relayed Mother's call to Grandmother's hand-cranked battery-powered wall telephone."
Thanks for sharing that story. The difficulty of communicating (and getting information) and the sense of community are both pretty sobering. I will look for this book in the library.
It's the 'fellas' that does it for me.
Same here, pal.
Post a Comment