My dad, James Leddy, died seven years ago today. He’d have been ninety-four this year. I’ll listen to one or more of his CDs today — maybe Ethel Waters, maybe Lee Wiley. Here is what I wrote after my dad died.
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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.
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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.
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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
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2022
(1004)
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▼
August
(95)
- Molly Dodd again
- LTC
- Nancy, peaking?
- Attachment F
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- Problems with Blogger comments
- Maggie Haberman, apologist
- Two TALs
- How Dr. Fauci caught COVID
- Misheard
- A joke in the traditional manner
- Undone by an archivist
- “Home”
- Leaving a Ph.D. program
- Where’s Mary?
- Only Murders
- “Trumpery insanity”
- Dreaming of Paris
- Ulysses again
- A pinned note
- NYPL
- Today’s Nancy
- Proust for all
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- A rotten sardine
- A woman in a window
- Deresiewicz on leaving academia
- Gravity and Dan Price
- Abdul Wadud (1947–2022)
- “I always liked poetry”
- Digging Troy
- Parody? Not parody?
- “All the documents”
- Pocket notebook sighting
- “Liberal elitist pizza”
- “Folks on the ground”
- Degree, not kind
- Shaving by night
- More bad stuff
- The Rehearsal
- Ten movies, two seasons
- Blatt’s 4 - 8 & 19¢ Store
- An IRS pipeline
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- In search of lost art supplies
- The ten-second balance test
- Attachment B
- Recently updated
- HCR, August 11
- Dusk, dusk, “Dusk”
- Worse than I imagined, I think
- Unsealed
- “O tell me where is fancy bread?”
- Recently updated
- A petard
- How to improve writing (no. 104)
- Raymond Briggs (1934–2022)
- “That’s our slogan”
- At the REC
- After Willa Cather’s birthday
- Drawing ability
- Mar-a-Lago “under siege”!
- After Louis Armstrong’s birthday
- Dream chords
- What commas don’t fix
- IRA = BFD
- Along came Mary, and a bookstore
- The Vignelli map
- Rats in cars
- The sound of the Senate
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- Dad, i.m.
- The new Bloomusalem
- Nancy meta
- Recently updated
- “Strange fishes withouten heads”
- Freddish
- “Longest way round”
- 4:17?
- In Kansas
- A catalogue
- A genuine misunderstanding
- Pocket notebook sighting
- Twelve movies
- Sardine bookmarks
-
▼
August
(95)
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: 2
Oh... I just got i.m. = in memoriam;
I was thinking "instant messaging"?
Instant messaging our dead family members?
I vote yes.
I'd i.m. my Auntie Vi--today would have been her 97th birthday--I visited her on her 96th.
And I'm i.m.ing "hello" to your dad.
Oh gosh, I didn’t even think of messaging. But I’m sure my dad gets the message. Vi too. : )
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