HCR on SCOTUS

Heather Cox Richardson writes about yesterday’s Supreme Court decision.

[More bad news to follow.]

Salomi and prosciuth

[Lassie, her friend Jeff, and an enemy. From the Lassie episode “The Dognappers” (December 3, 1961). Click either image for a larger view.]

I like to watch Lassie when I fold laundry. I’m not ashamed.

But I had to stop folding and hit Pause when I saw that window. I thought I knew what was up, and the wider view clinched it.

The show’s writers might be having a joke, or trying to have a joke, on Italian-American prounciation, though no one would change the /a/ sound of salami to an /o/ or spell the word with an o. And in Italian-American Italian, prosciutto is properly pronounced /pro-SHOOT/. If the writers aren’t joking about pronunciation, the odd-looking prosciuth might a joke on the improbability of an Italian grocery store in Calverton. Or maybe the writers just didn’t get it right.

The food names in the other window might help sort out these possibilities, but the signage is just too blurry, at least for me. I enlarged, experimented with contrast and resolution — just too blurry.

*

An astute reader sees copicoli and provoloni in the other window, and suggests that the propmaster was having a joke. The propmaster for this and 283 more Lassie episodes: Mariano Tomasino. He must have been having a joke.

Related posts
All OCA Lassie posts : Bafangool! : Capeesh? : New Jersey Italian : Parlando italiano a Brooklyn

And a 2004 New York Times article has more about Italian-American Italian.

Dream-machines

The narrator has fallen into “an uneasy friendship” with John Wolfson — Wolf.

Steven Millhauser, “The Room in the Attic,” in Dangerous Laughter (2008).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Avocado pareidolia

[Click for a larger smile.]

I see the eyes and nose over the left side of the smile, or, from Gus’s point of view, the right. His name is Augustine Vocado, A. Vocado. He runs a fruit-and-vegetable market (that makes sense) in one of the city’s older neighborhoods. A. claims to know Mac, the man who lived on my office floor: “Oh, me and him go way back.” I have no way of knowing if he’s telling the truth.

Related reading
All OCA pareidolia posts (Pinboard)

Footage / Fish

“Footage / Fish”: so says the webpage. More specifically: 1940s French Women Sardine Industry Cannery Workers Brittany Vintage Film Movie. Dig the coiffe. Dig the stacks.

Thanks, Brian.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

What’s going on at TCM

From NPR’s Fresh Air: David Bianculli, television critic explains why those who love film should be worried about what’s going on at TCM.

[I am.]

“HOME SWEET HOME”

Steven Millhauser, “Cat ’n’ Mouse,” in Dangerous Laughter (2008).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Aircut

George Bodmer’s Oscar’s Day: “You shouldn’t be able to cut the air.”

[Our air quality today: 178. Wildfires.]

Numerals

A quiz from The Chicago Manual of Style: Chicago Style Workout 77: Numerals.

Someday I’m gonna get 100. (I got an 80.)

“Why is this here?”

From xkcd : “Design Notes on the Alphabet.”

After browsing John Guillory

I’m browsing John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). I find many good observations in what I’ve read: about the displacement of the literary text as an object of study, about criticism of society as the motive of scholarship, about the contracting of literary study to modern and contemporary realist prose narratives “amenable to interpretation within a political thematic” — developments that I too lament.

But then I read this passage in an essay about graduate education, with a suggestion about how to improve doctoral study:

What I want to propose more urgently is a way of relating the temporary career of graduate students to the lives they will most likely have after graduate school, if circumstances do not favor their getting a tenure-track job. I argued in another venue (at the MLA conference of 2020) that graduate students need to be apprised of market conditions and of alternatives to the career of college professor as soon as they arrive on campus. Only such honesty and transparency, instated at the very beginning of the first semester, has any chance of preventing or mitigating the bitterness of disappointed expectations. . . .

“The very beginning of the first semester”? Isn’t that a bit like — or more than a bit like — explaining the problems of owning a time-share after the buyer has already signed?

Guillory further suggests that the best way to help graduate students maintain an engagement with literary study after graduate school

is to introduce [them] to as many alumni of the system as are willing and able to speak to them about their careers after graduate school. Many of these alumni, we know, did not get tenure-track jobs but escaped the trap of adjunct labor; many are now employed in nonacademic professions. Let us invite them to return and tell us what they got from their experience in graduate school.

That certainly sounds like a risky proposition. And notice that phrase: “the trap of adjunct labor.” Here, as in English studies generally, the emphasis is on encouraging students to identify with the lucky few deemed winners. So yes, even if you don’t get a tenure-track position, you too can be a museum curator, &c.

Browsing this book makes me think anew about my life in academia, which I call a fluke life.

“Artists wear Wranglers”

[Life, August 19, 1962. Click for a much larger view.]

What the advertisement says:

The beret and the beard help. But blue jeans are as vital as North light to his creative spirit. Jeans are standard equipment with a lot of unusual people. Wranglers are the jeans they choose. We can’t promise you a one-man show at the Metropolitan; but we can give you the same lean, slim fit, the same sure-sizing that every artist wants. Pre-shrunk to the right size before they’re even sewn together. In sizes for all the artists in your family. From $2.49 to $4.29.

If you look closely at that beard, you’ll see that it’s pasted on.

[Found while looking for something else in Google Books’ Life archive. There was a series of “________ wear Wranglers” advertisements in Life. This one is, I think, the goofiest.]

English orthography

Steven Millhauser, “An Adventure of Don Juan,” in The King in the Tree: Three Novellas (2003).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Hitler Moms

News from Indiana, as reported in The Indianapolis Star:

The Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national organization recently listed as an "extremist group" by a civil rights watchdog, apologized Thursday morning after it launched a newsletter called The Parent Brigade Wednesday that featured a quote from Adolf Hitler on its front cover.

The quotation was a variation on the words Representative Mary Miller (R, IL-15) spoke on January 5, 2020: “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” The Moms have it as “He, alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.”

The Star also reports on two other appearances of these words in recent American discourse, on a billboard in 2014 and in a 2023 Facebook post by a member of a Colorado Springs school aboard.

It never occurs to these dangerous people that Hitler did have the youth — the Hitler Youth, as I reminded Mary Miller in 2022. But as I pointed out to her, he did not have the future. And neither will the Moms.

Notice who’s speaking later this week at an event the Moms are promoting: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

Surface absence

[Beetle Bailey, June 22 and 26, 2023.]

I noticed the absence of surfaces Last week and thought about putting in a line, but I’m happy to see they got around to it themselves.

A Boro Park five-and-ten

[4318 13th Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

In our house it was known as the five-and-ten. Or Woolworth’s. I have a limited number of specific memories of the Woolwort's pictured here: Silly Putty, smooth wood floors, enormous (or so they seemed) glass cases full of loose candy to be scooped into paper bags, small Christmas presents for my grandparents — a comb, a pocket mirror.

Note the baby carriages parked in front of the store. I’ve established to my satisfaction that yes, people really did leave carriages outside stores. It was another world, in a number of ways: here is the lunch counter in the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s that is now the International Civil Rights Center & Museum.

More pictures of interiors: the Library of Congress has a number of photographs of shoppers in the 1930s and ’40s; a Wisconsin newspaper offers nine photographs from the 1955 opening of a Woolworth’s in Falls River. And here’s Madison Woolworth’s, also from 1955. The 1968 film The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter has scenes in a working Woolworth’s. I put two representative shots in this post. The Woolworth-hungry reader can find more photographs by searching for woolworth store interior.

In recent years this Brooklyn storefront has housed a Duane Reade, a Carter’s with clothing for babies and kids, Little Luxury (baby clothes), and Regency Family Wear.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg. Gosh, is it ever. When I finished, forty-three minutes after starting, I thought of a clue to capture my reaction: “Initial disbelief.” Answer: WTF. I’ve rarely seen a Stumper this difficult. In other words, I loved it. Or better: I loved having solved it.

The three clues that broke the puzzle open for me: 16-A, ten letters, “Group amusement”; 40-A, thirteen letters, “Literally, ‘harm joy’”; and 59-A, five letters, “Seasonal swimmer septet.” That last clue was my starting point, which gives some idea of this puzzle’s difficulty.

Some other clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, seven letters, “Entry-level guy.” Clever.

7-D, four letters, “Duettist in Haydn’s Creation.” My first thought was OBOE. If it’s in a crossword, it must be an OBOE, right?

13-A, ten letters, “Instrumental part favored by Beethoven.” It seems to be true.

26-D, ten letters, “Made a cactus garden, say.” Hoo boy.

31-A, three letters, “Toaster’s goal, perhaps.” Pretty oblique.

35-D, eight letters, “Hybrid outerwear.” Initial disbelief hardening into permanent disbelief.

36-D, eight letters, “Directive for details.” Not exactly misdirective, but not especially directive either.

56-A, ten letters, “They pair well with pasta.” I should have seen it right away.

My favorite in this puzzle: 50-D, four letters, “What a seer often says?” It’s my favorite because I didn’t understand it until thinking about it for the third or fourth time.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“A big white moon”

Steven Millhauser, “Revenge,” in The King in the Tree: Three Novellas (2003).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

In a Mellotron

“Conceived as a parlor instrument, it made its way into countless formative hits that continue to define classic rock stations today and laid the groundwork for some of our most common studio tools.” From JSTOR Daily, “Tape Heads,” a look at the Mellotron in rock.

And speaking of a parlor instrument, in 2008 I made a short post about a 1965 demo that presents the Mellotron as just that. When I looked up the demo this morning, without even thinking about that post, I noticed the same slightly crazed look on the keyboardist’s face at 2:41. But this time I also noticed an only slightly less crazed look on the demonstrator’s face at 2:11. The host and demonstator are conductor Eric Robinson and magician David Nixon, who together created the Mellotronics company to sell the Mellotron. The keyboardist is Geoff Unwin, an early Mellotron user.

Here’s Paul McCartney demonstrating the instrument.

[Post title with apologies to Duke Ellington.]

From The Pencil

From Henry Petroski’s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990):

Pencils can be as important as toys, and they often have been used as toys. We once wrinkled our faces to hold mustache pencils between the upper lip and the nose, and we scribbled pencil mustaches on posters in the days of erasable graffiti. Young boys made pencil tusks hang from their nostrils, and older girls put pencils under their breasts to test if they needed a bra. We twirled, chewed, tapped, doodled, and sometimes even took notes with pencils during classes, as we would later during meetings.

We use pencils to stir paint, prop up windows, open stubborn plastic bags, dial telephones, and punch holes in aluminum beer cans whose ring openers have come off in our fingers. As calculator buttons grew smaller we used, in an ironic twist, the eraser end of a pencil to tap out our sums. Still later, as parents, we showed our small children how to fit the pencil eraser into the holes left by the broken buttons on a Speak & Spell, and now our children show us how to use a pencil to remove tapes from a videocassette recorder whose eject button has fallen inside. It works because a pencil lead conducts electricity.

Some of us, before our arthritis got too bad, tried to experience the sensation known to the medical profession as Aristotle’s anomaly: “When the first and second fingers are crossed and a small object such as a pencil is placed between them the false impression is gained that there are two objects.” Apparently, for some people at least, when the pencil touches two parts of the skin that are not ordinarily touched simultaneously by a single object, the one pencil is perceived as two. As our arthritis got worse, our doctors prescribed medicine in containers designed to be opened with a pencil acting as a lever.

The pencil is always an extension of the fingers. With a pencil we can count beyond our ten digits, usually striking out every four marks with a fifth — four vertical fingers made into a hand by a diagonal thumb. We can turn the pages of slick magazines and catalogues more quickly with the dry eraser than the licked finger. We can dial or press telephones that our nails are too long or our fingers too fat to work. We can hold more places in books by sticking pencils where our fingers were. We can point to details that our fingers would obscure. We can exaggerate our gestures. We can make visible what our fingers can only trace in air. We can vote not by raising our hands but by marking our secret ballots.

A related post
Henry Petroski (1942–2023)

Henry Petroski (1942–2023)

Henry Petroski, engineer, teacher, and writer, has died at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times has an obituary. And there’s one from Duke University.

I’ve read and own several of Henry Petroski’s books. The one closest to my heart: The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990). I wrote Professor Petroski a fan letter after reading that book, and for a while we had a correspondence. His letters, always, were in pencil.

“Look! The lead!”

“Look! The lead! It shoots onto the paper as clear and pure as if it’s been chiseled with a laser ray”: “Real-Life Science Fiction Premise Plays Out As Man Employs So-Called Mechanical Pencil.”

Sardines on the screen

A beautiful short film: Inside Portugal’s tinned-fish industry. I can vouch for the Nuri brand — they’re wonderful sardines.

Thanks to Stephen at Pencil Talk for sending news of this film my way.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

“Some rocks,” some boid

[Nancy, June 21, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s yesterday’s Nancy, Sluggo has proposed that he and Nancy wade in th’ lake. Nancy thinks the water may be too deep. “Don’t be silly,” says Sluggo. “Look at dat li’l boid.” Indeed there is a boid standing in the water. Or there was.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[“Some rocks” is an abiding preoccupation of these pages.]

Misheard

“QAnon is a proud supporter of public television.”

No: Cunard, as in cruises.

Related reading
All OCA misheard posts (Pinboard)

[In my defense: I was at some distance from the television and not looking at the screen.]

Attics

Steven Millhauser, “Revenge,” in The King in the Tree: Three Novellas (2003).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Little libraries

In Santa Barbara, California, the artist Douglas Lochner has created six little libraries in the shape of punctuation marks and typographical symbols. I especially like the inverted exclamation point, an acknowledgement of the Spanish language.

Related reading
All OCA library posts (Pinboard)

Steven Millhauser and K-pop

The group is Billlie; the song is “Enchanted Night,” which shares its title with Steven Millhauser’s 1999 novella. You can see a member of the group holding the paperback in this video. Here’s a still.

Readers of the novella will notice a clear connection: young women entering a house at night. In the novella, they are Summer Storm, Black Star, Night Rider, Paper Doll, and Fast Lane. They wear black masks and leave notes reading WE ARE YOUR DAUGHTERS.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

“She has seen this one before”

Steven Millhauser, “Mannequin Mischief,” in Enchanted Night (1999).

Anything can happen in the dark, especially if it’s the dark in a Steven Millhauser novella.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

They’ve got an awful lot of Outback in Brazil

A Washington Post reporter investigates the popularity of Outback Steakhouse in Brazil.

[Post title with apologies to “The Coffee Song.”]

Old magazines

In The New York Times, Brian Dillon recommends reading old magazines as “cheap time machines.” He assures the reader that no rabbit holes await. But as a browser of the Google Books archive of Life, I have to disagree.

Juneteenth Manzarene

To mark Juneteenth, Dust-to-Digital is offering a free download of the 76-page book that accompanied its 2016 release Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. Washington Phillips (1880–1954) recorded eighteen sides between 1927 and 1929, singing and accompanying himself on an instrument he called the Manzarene. Its sound is haunting and disarmingly beautiful. I’d call it the sound of peace.

Dust-to-Digital notes that Phillips’s neighbor Doris Nealy recalled Juneteenth as a day of great importance to Phillips: “The son of freed slaves, Phillips would often lead the preaching and singing at the annual Juneteenth celebration in his hometown of Simsboro, Texas.”

Here is just one sample of Phillips in the recording studio: “I Had a Good Father and Mother.”

A related post
My review of Washington Phillips and His Manazrene Dreams

[Note: the free download is for the book. You’ll have to navigate the order form and apply the code JUNETEENTH. Phillips's sixteen surviving recordings stream widely, and a limited number of CD-and-book sets are still available for purchase.]

“Under the rays of moonlight”

Steven Millhauser, “The Moon and the Mannequin,” in Enchanted Night (1999).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Juneteenth

From the Library of Congress: Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories, recordings from 1932, 1933, 1940, 1941, and 1949.

It’s staggering to know that the last survivor of American slavery died in 1975.

Three Juneteenth posts
A flag : Eugene Robinson on Juneteenth : From Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth

Father’s Day

My dad stopped by in advance of this Father’s Day. It was the night of June 3, or it might have been the morning of June 4. I wasn’t looking at the clock. He was working at his desk, figuring something out with pencil on paper. I leaned down and kissed him on his head.

The more time that passes, the more I (a non-believer) agree with words attributed to John Chrysostom: “Those whom we love and lose are no longer where they were before. They are now wherever we are.”

Happy Father’s Day to all.

Five-and-ten, five-and-dime

Re: 33-A in today’s Saturday Stumper and a question in a comment:

A 1958 note in American Speech investigates usage: “Five-and-Ten, Five-and-Dime.” The unidentified writer, who grew up in New York City, recalls the five-and-ten-cent store, the five-and-ten, and the ten-cent store as the terms in use in his youth. He thinks that ‑dime forms are latecomers, with their fortunes on the rise. But is he happy about that?

To my ear, the expressions dime store and five-and-dime (store ) have an air of affectation. Several other native New Yorkers to whom I have put the question feel that the dime-expressions have pretensions.

That’s as far down that rabbit hole as I’m gonna go.

There’s also variety store. Did that term catch on when prices made five and ten and dime implausible?

[The article is available from JSTOR. Anyone without library access can create a free account to read a limited number of articles each month. I can’t type that sentence without thinking about the short, tragic life of Aaron Swartz.]

“Ghost Town” on Soul Music

“In the interests of balance, I think you should play ‘Ghost Town’ every night after ‘God Save the King’ — how about that?” Jerry Dammers, in a Soul Music episode about his song (BBC Radio 4).

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski. For me, a twenty-five-minute pleasant challenge, with the finish line never feeling out of reach. At the center of the grid, three stepped eleven-letter answers. And everywhere in the puzzle, surprises and tricks a-plenty.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

22-D, ten letters, “You and me, essentially.” Yeesh.

32-D, four letters, “What often precedes the question.” Stumper Alert.

33-A, eleven letters, “ Dollar store ancestors.” I knew it right off.

33-A, eleven letters, “Its lexicon includes ‘banner’ and ‘standard.’” Even spelled correctly, the answer looks wrong.

36-D, eight letters, “Not done.” My first guess, VERYRARE, had me hung up for a bit.

38-D, six letters, “They have currency.” Nation-states?

40-D, six letters, “Set spot.” Vague until it’s not.

49-A, five letters, “Cans of Worcestershire.” Clever.

55-A, three letters, “___ wagon (vehicle that follows bike racers).” How did I know this?

60-A, four letters, “Worked with numbers.” I kept thinking the answer had to end in -ED. But how could it?

My favorite in this puzzle: 25-A, four letters, “Does as well as others.” Just nifty.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A chart, not especially helpful

The New York Times has created an ingenious scrolling chart (gift link) to sort out congressional Republican responses to the second indictment. The only problem: an ingenious scrolling chart is not especially helpful for anyone who wants to check on a particular member of Congress. There are no names, just small photographs of faces, greyed out until one scrolls to a relevant category of response and some faces turn full-color. Faces are arranged from less to more conservative, though it’s not clear what their arrangment into rows means.

I had no problem finding Illinois’s Mary Miller: I looked at the more conservative end of the spectrum and scrolled until her tiny head turned blonde. There she was, one of just thirty-three members who claim that the indictment signals the advent of autocracy (“BANANA REPUBLIC,” Miller wrote on Twitter), and one of just nineteen members who call the indictment “election interference.”

What would be a much more useful presentation: an alphabetical list of members, with categories of response to the right of their names. That would make it easy to find a given member and see how many categories of response apply to that member’s comments.

I’ll invoke my mantra about technology: Technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. That one can arrange tiny greyed-out faces into a chart doesn’t mean that one should.

Small Protest

“With Putin’s crackdown on protests of the Ukraine war, people have found ways to express their opposition through small displays of resistance”: “Decoding the Antiwar Messages of Miniature Protesters in Russia” (The New York Times, gift link).

Here is the Instagram page malenkiy_piket (Small Protest). A small protest is no small thing: as the Times article points out, it can mean arrest and imprisonment.

“Kraahraark!” (Bloomsday)

It’s June 16, 1904, and Leopold Bloom is, as he often is, inventing. From the “Hades” episode, after the graveside service for Paddy Dignam:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Mr. Bloom would no doubt be interested in AI efforts to ventriloquize the dead. And in hologram performances by the dead. And in gravestones with QR codes and recipes.

I think Joyce would have been amused by this story of an Irish voice out of the grave. But he’d have to go to YouTube to get the video that captured the moment.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses” (Oxford English Dictionary ). “Wisdom Hely’s”: Charles Wisdom Hely, (1856–1929), Dublin printer and stationer. Another mourner in this episode recalls that Bloom as having been “in the stationery line.” “Yes,” says another, “in Wisdom Hely’s. A traveller for blottingpaper.” In other words, a salesman.]

Analog trends

The Washington Post reports on six analog trends: print books, film cameras, letters and postcards, pens and stationery, vinyl, and “collecting” (e.g., matchbooks).

[That’s a gift link.]

“Real pretty, real professional”

Steven Millhauser, “Three Young Men,” in Enchanted Night (1999).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Top of the muffin

I was setting up a next appointment for my mom when one staff person said to another that her Seinfeld friend had sent her a meme that morning: “Top of the muffin to you!” (Perhaps this one?)

I started laughing, really laughing. “I couldn’t help overhearing,” I said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” And we started talking about Seinfeld. It was a pleasant unexpected moment in the day.

Robert Gottlieb (1931-2023)

Robert Gottlieb, editor and writer, has died at the age of ninety-two. From the New York Times obituary (gift link):

“I would read three to four books a day after school, and could read for 16 hours at a time,” he told the Times in 1980. “Mind you, that’s all I did. I belonged to three lending libraries and the public library.”

The relationship between an editor and a writer is the subject of the 2022 documentary film Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, directed by Gottlieb’s daughter Lizzie Gottlieb. I recommend it highly.

A related post
Robert Gottlieb on editing

First!

From The New York Times (gift link): “To Fight Book Bans, Illinois Passes a Ban on Book Bans”:

Taking a new tack in the ideological battle over what books children should be able to read, Illinois will prohibit book bans in its public schools and libraries, with Gov. J.B. Pritzker calling the bill that he signed on Monday the first of its kind.

The law, which takes effect next year, was the Democratic-controlled state’s response to a sharp rise in book-banning efforts across the country, especially in Republican-led states, where lawmakers have made it easier to remove library books that political groups deemed objectionable.

Related reading
All OCA library posts (Pinboard)

[“The Democratic-controlled state’s reponse”: How about “the Democratic-led legislature’s response”?]

Zippy as Percy

[“La-La Land Grab.” Zippy, June 14, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy is in Los Angeles, 1947, thinking about Edmond O’Brien, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lizabeth Scott. And Percy Helton, whose face and voice, if not name, should be familiar to any viewer of older movies.

Related reading
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Pleaded or pled?

Public service announcement: its pled, not pleaded. cc: @PreetBharara

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) June 13, 2023

Joyce Vance is a frequent guest on MSNBC. She’s full of legal smarts, but this PSA is misguided. As Garner’s Modern English Usage points out, “pleaded, the strongly predominant form in both AmE and BrE, is always the best choice.” Here’s an OCA post with much more on the matter: The past plead.

And an additional PSA:

The word needed in the tweet above is it’s. Follow Jessica Mitford’s helpful (?) guidance in Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (1979):

When is it its ? When it’s not it is.

When is it it’s ? When it is it is.

[For future reference: today a twice-impeached, twice-indicted, once-held-liable disgraced former president pleaded not guilty to charges concerning the retention, concealment, and mishandling of classified materials. Here’s that arraignment day.]

The last Beatles song?

From The Washington Post (gift link):

Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” decades after the band broke up, Paul McCartney said Tuesday.

McCartney, 80, told the BBC that the technology was used to separate the Beatles’ voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, The Beatles: Get Back. The “new” song is set to be released later this year, he said.

Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” McCartney told BBC radio. “He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar.’”

The song seems to be John’s “Now and Then,” which Paul, George and Ringo worked on at the time of the Beatles’ Anthology. George dismissed the song (reportedly calling it “fucking rubbish”), and “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” were the only new Beatles recordings released.

Me, I think John’s piano-vocal demo is a beautifully sad song. I hope that feeling isn’t lost under too many layers of production as the demo gets turned into a record.

Related reading
All OCA Beatles posts (Pinboard)

[Lost Media Wiki: “To date, no content from the overdub sessions in 1994 and 1995 has resurfaced either officially or unofficially.” The various versions of “Now and Then” with fuller instrumentation that can be found online are the work of fans.]

Separated at birth (DeSantis edition)

The Broadway actor Denée Benton made news by calling Ron DeSantis the “current Grand Wizard” of Florida. As they say, if the hood fits, &c.

I admit though that when I heard about the epithet, I thought of a different Grand Wizard. That downturned mouth, that scrunched-up face — Ron DeSantis looks the evil manager known to fans of 1970s professional wrestling as the Grand Wizard. Yes, I was a consumer of UHF television in the 1970s. I liked junk and weirdness.

 
[Color drained but otherwise unretouched. Click either image for a larger view.]

Here’s just one sample of the Grand Wizard’s shtick.

Also separated at birth
Claude Akins and Simon Oakland : Ernest Angley and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán : Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : William Barr and Edward Chapman : Bérénice Bejo and Paula Beer : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : Ernie Bushmiller and Red Rodney : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Henry Daniell and Anthony Wiener : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Adam Driver and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska : Bonita Granville and Cyndi Lauper : Charles Grassley and Abraham Jebediah Simpson II : Christopher Guest and Donald Wolfit : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Pat Harrington Jr. and Marcel Herrand : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Steven Isserlis and Pat Metheny : Colonel Wilhelm Klink and Rudy Giuliani : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Don Lake and Andrew Tombes : Markku Luolajan-Mikkola and John Malkovich : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Chico Marx and Robert Walden : Elisabeth Moss and Alexis Smith : Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny : Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Gene Wilder

[I like this detail from the Wikipedia article about Ernie Roth, who played the Grand Wizard: “Roth, who was Jewish, reportedly took the name ‘The Grand Wizard’ as a snub to the white supremacy organization the Ku Klux Klan, whose leaders were called Grand Wizard.”]

Kind of Kind of Blue

A dog-food commercial with faux Kind of Blue (specifically, "So What") as background music? Clearly, the commercial was made so that I would notice it and then say something about it.

My dad brought me up right: I’ve been listening to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue since it appeared in 1959 (in my toddlerhood). Everyone should have a copy of Kind of Blue in the house.

Related reading
All OCA Miles Davis posts (Pinboard)

[Thanks to Elaine for the post title.]

Soul “Eyes”

Soul Music (BBC Radio 4) has a beautiful episode about Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It’s great to hear Terry Johnson talk of the Flamingos about how he reimagined the song and how the rest of the group reacted.

Here’s a version of the song that didn’t make it into the podcast, from Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy. It bears the Terry Johnston stamp. Discographical info here.

[About the post title: “Soul Eyes” is a tune by Mal Waldron. I couldn't resist.]

Great typos

From Jack Shepherd’s On Words and Up Words: six great typos of history. With a special appearance by Tytyuyllus, or Titivillus, a devil whose job it was (is?) to collect from a particular monastic community a thousand sacks a day of “failings and negligences” in syllables and words. Otherwise, he got (gets?) a beating. Which might mean that when we fix our typos, we are depriving some other demonic spirit of an honest day’s labor.

Writer, spare that typo?

A book from Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson, the historian who writes Letters from an American, has a book coming in September, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. She describes it in her June 10 letter.

Mark Hurst on Vision Pro

Mark Hurst, who led a charge against Google Glass ten years ago, has now written about Apple’s Vision Pro headset, or as he calls it, Vision No:

What imitation of vision there is in the device, exists only as machine vision, continually scanning both inside and out. A phalanx of cameras monitors the user’s eyes in order to display them on the device’s front panel, while other cameras spy on the room layout, the furniture, and the people nearby — as the user’s eyes are locked away inside the Vision No enclosure. The only way for users to see anything is to accept the representation of the world as offered by the corporation’s filters. I don’t know about you, but my grip on reality — incomplete and imperfect as it may be — will not improve by passing through the hidden manipulations of a two-trillion-dollar company with an insatiable need for growth.

I recently listened to a Mac-centric podcast whose hosts were enthusiastic about Vision Pro. Two grown-ups excited about — it’s their example — the prospect of looking at spreadsheets on the top of a mountain. A virtual mountain, that is, a digital wallpaper that replaces your surroundings. Neil Postman suggested asking six questions about any new technology. The first one alone poses a problem for Vision Pro: “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?”

A related post
My surroundings already are “an infinite canvas”

[I hadn’t realized that the device displays one’s eyes on the screen. Eyes without a face! That’s beyond creepy.]

116th and Park

[1640 and 1642 Park Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click either image for a much larger view.]

What made me look up the corner of 116th Street and Park Avenue: The Pawnbroker (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1964). Sol Nazerman, Holocaust survivor and pawnbroker, has his shop at 1642.

[Nazerman (Rod Steiger), white hair, dark sweater, is just to the right of the 95. 95 E. 116th seems to be another way of referring to 1640 Park. Click for a much larger view. ]

The rhyme is beyond uncanny: 1642, the site of Nazerman’s pawn shop, was once the home of Kamerman & Co. Plumbing Supplies. In 1920 a trade publication described Israel Kamerman as “the well-known jobber who conducts a large, up-to-date supply house at 1642 Park avenue [sic].”

The corner location that became El Radiante later became an herbs-and-spices store, a botánica, and a deli. Today the corner is the site of a seven- or nine-story condo building in progress.

In 1970, 1642 was demolished, with a low-income housing development taking its place in 2009. Here’s a 1995 photograph showing the herbs-and-spices store and the then-empty lot.

On March 12, 2014, a gas explosion destroyed 1644 and 1646. Eight people were killed; more than seventy were injured. Here is a New York Times article about the mourning that followed.

The 1644 lot still stands vacant. Since at least September 2015, a sign has been attached to the chainlink fence in front of the property. A small tree in a planter stands in front of the fence. Google Maps photographs through the years show flowers and photographs left on the fence. The artist’s renderings of what will be the new 1640 and its environs show none of that.

When you look into the history of an address, you never know what you’re going to find.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Boxes

[Click for a larger view.]

Between the toilet
And the shower
Fall the Boxes.

If you saw something like this in someone’s house, you’d worry, wouldn’t you? I’m saving this DOJ photograph here to caution myself against far milder kinds of clutter. Also against installing a chandelier in the batheroonie.

*

Also: looking more closely, I now see that there are boxes in the tub, reaching to the ceiling.

Between the boxes
And the boxes
Falls the Shower Curtain.

[Poetry, such as it is, with apologies to T.S. Eliot.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

In the word of 53-A, five letters, “Peanuts plaint”: ______! Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Lester Ruff, or Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, composing under the pseudonym that signals an easier Stumper. The puzzle is fairly easy, but I hit a snag in the upper left corner: 17-A, six letters, “Physician’s patron.” All I could think of was HERMES, which is not a good answer, but ASCLEPIUS didn’t fit. So I searched for “Physician’s patron,” and magically, that corner fell into place, becoming as straightforward as I think it was meant to be.

Some more clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, six letters, “Whom Alda got his M*A*S*H nickname from.” Lifelong learning.

12-D, eight letters, “Monitored?” Clever.

16-A, eight letters, “Successor to LAN technologies.” What once sounded like the future now sounds like science-fiction of the past.

22-A, three letters, “Not following.” Befitting a Stumper.

24-D, five letters, “Changes to one’s story.” Not LIES.

25-D, four letters, “Viva Rock Vegas character.” An idiosyncratically specific way to clue this name.

35-A, fifteen letters, “Nothing I can do.” Just a nice bit of colloquial speech.

36-D, eight letters, “It achieved statehood in 1901.” Statehood, eh? NEWMEXI? — oops, no.

48-A, six letters, “811, to librarians.” Or to readers who know the stacks.

My favorite in this puzzle: 46-D, six letters, “Cat without a coat.” More lifelong learning.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Unsealed

The indictment is here for the reading. Just one passage:

The classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack. The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.

The document is worth reading in its entirety. It makes clear that Trump knew exactly what he was doing, knew that he wasn’t supposed to be doing it, and went to great lengths to keep what he had in his possession in his possession. Notice, for instance, in section 66, the discussion of a Redweld folder and a “plucking motion.” No words, no explicit instruction, just a motion.

*

Notice too, in a snarky spirit, 58.c., which reproduces a text from a female member of the Trump family to Walt Nauta:

I saw you put boxes to Potus room. Just FYI and I will tell him as well:

Not sure how many he wants to take on Friday on the plane. We will NOT have a room for them. Plane will be full with luggage.

“I saw you put boxes to Potus room”: that’s gotta be Melania Trump, sounding a bit like Natasha Fatale.

It’s so extraordinary to think that that a non-reader may be meeting his downfall over an insistence on keeping printed matter close. I keep thinking about serial killers who save mementos of their crimes. But here the mementos themselves are crimes.

[A Redweld folder? That’s what I think most stationery fanatics know as a red-rope folder.]

How to convict

If I were to read one item today about last night’s indictment, it’d be this one, by Norman Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, and Joyce Vance: “How to Convict Trump” (The New York Times gift link).

[I’m not sure why the Times has the writers’ names in that order, but I’ve kept that order here.]

Writing it and changing it

The composer John Kander, in an interview aired on the PBS NewsHour last night:

“The ideas can be terrible, and nobody is a bad person because they have it. So you write it, and then you change it.”

Great advice for any endeavor that allows for revision.

Snoopy, downstairs

Snoopy is planning to play at Wimbledon. Charlie Brown: “Where will you stay if you go to England? You don’t know anyone there.”

[Peanuts, June 11, 1976. Click for a larger view.]

I always like seeing a Peanuts strip that references some once-obvious, now-gone bit of popular culture. The reference in this strip, then and now, is to the television series Upstairs, Downstairs, the Downton Abbey of its time (1971–1975 in the UK, 1973–1977 in the U.S.). I remember Mrs. Bridges and Mr. Hudson (Angela Baddeley and Gordon Jackson) and Rose (Jean Marsh), all from downstairs. No other names have stuck.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

Sláinte!

We have a bottle of Redbreast twelve-year-old Irish whiskey ($$!), bought in anticipation of a friend’s visit this summer. Our friend can’t visit, so we need another occasion for which to open it. I think that occasion is now: “Trump Indicted in Documents Case” (New York Times gift link).

*

Redbreast is so good.

“Books are weapons in the war of ideas”

[“Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons. Franklin Roosevelt.” Poster by S[teve] Broder. 1942. From the Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

I found this poster via a report on “Letters Rising in the Air,” an exhibit at the National Library of Israel marking the ninetieth anniversary of Nazi bookburning in Berlin (May 10, 1933). Follow the link to see a letter (May 9) from Stefan Zweig to Max Brod urging a response by German-Jewish writers to the imminent burning. Also at the link: two partially burned pages from the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, psychologist and sexologist.

Cather in the Capitol

There’s now a statue of Willa Cather in the United States Capitol’s Statuary Hall. I watched as much of the unveiling ceremony as I could bear, with a series of political figures characterizing Cather as a Nebraskan, a nostalgist, a regionalist, a writer of the (so-called) heartland. No mention of the young woman who cut her hair, wore men’s clothing, and signed her name William. (Here’s a photograph of the young Cather.) No acknowledgement that Cather left Nebraska in her early twenties and lived most of her life in New York City, making a home with Edith Lewis, her companion (as they used to say) of nearly forty years. A low point that wasn’t a silence: a string quartet fumbling through “Maple Leaf Rag.” More nostalgia, I guess. Something that Thea Kronborg sang might have been more fitting.

I think of Susan Howe’s repudiation of another writer’s characterization of Emily Dickinson: “Who is this Spider-Artist? Not my Emily Dickinson.” Who is this Nebraska nostalgist? Not my Willa Cather.

Perhaps a lower point than the mangled Joplin: PBS NewsHour anchor Geoff Bennett mangled the name of My Ántonia, Cather’s best-known novel, as “My An-TOW-nee-uh.”

*

After writing this post, I remembered something in a previous post, from a letter Cather wrote to the critic E.K. Brown (April 9, 1937):

I think you make a very usual mistake, however, in defining a writer geographically. Myself, I read a man (or a woman) for the climate of his mind, not for the climates in which he has happened to live.

Related reading
All OCA Willa Cather posts (Pinboard)

Out the window

It’s a busy day in news, so I made the mistake of looking at Talking Points Memo. From a piece by the proprietor, Josh Marshall:

As you’ve likely heard, CNN CEO Chris Licht was fired today, not so much because of that headline-grabbing Atlantic article but because of a string of failures and reverses which might have simmered and percolated for a few months longer if a minor-defenestratory masterpiece had not wrapped them together with a bow in a way that was impossible to ignore.

A string that might have simmered and percolated, save that a masterpiece wrapped them together with a unignorable bow and . . . also threw them out the window?

I’m not sure what “minor-defenestratory” might even mean: throwing someone out a first-floor window? I’m more deeply confused about how much credit Marshall is giving the Atlantic article: Licht was fired not because of the article but because the article made all his failures known?

But I refuse to take the time to try to improve Marshall’s sentence, which I think would make, as is, a fine sixth exhibit in George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I hope

From The Independent:

The Department of Justice is preparing to ask a Washington, DC grand jury to indict former president Donald Trump for violating the Espionage Act and for obstruction of justice as soon as Thursday, adding further weight to the legal baggage facing [burdening?] Mr. Trump as he campaigns for his party’s nomination in next year’s presidential election.

The Independent has learned that prosecutors are ready to ask grand jurors to approve an indictment against Mr. Trump for violating a portion of the US criminal code known as Section 793, which prohibits “gathering, transmitting or losing” any “information respecting the national defence.”

The use of Section 793, which does not make reference to classified information, is understood to be a strategic decision by prosecutors that has been made to short-circuit Mr Trump’s ability to claim that he used his authority as president to declassify documents he removed from the White House and kept at his Palm Beach, Florida property long after his term expired on 20 January 2021.

Mike Pence beareth false witness

Mike Pence just said that he and his wife Karen have “the three most beautiful granddaughters ever born in the history of the world.”

Grandparents everywhere know that’s not true.

Amusements

Steven Millhauser, “Paradise Park,” in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

A lost sauce

[New York, February 15, 1971. Click for a larger view.]

I remember seeing Aunt Millie’s sauce in Brooklyn kidhood, on the shelf in Vinny & Rogers, the butcher shop where we bought our meat and poultry. When I went out on my own, I bought Aunt Millie’s out of deep nostalgia. Besides, it was a good sauce.

I was ready to scoff at this advertisement’s claim that Aunt Millie came in to check on the sauce, but there was indeed an Aunt Millie. Here’s a 1966 New York Times article about Carmella (Millie) and Salvatore Di Mauro, which makes clear that this 1983 commercial was reality-based. Salvatore died in 2006; Carmella in 2007. Heinz bought the Aunt Millie’s brand from Borden in 2001; by 2013 the brand was discontinued.

These days I make my own sauce, a long one (two-and-a-half to three hours) or a short one known as Coppola/“Godfather” sauce.

[Is that Zohra Lampert in the commercial? As for ortolan: I’m sorry I wondered.]

Astrud Gilberto (1940–2023)

Astrud Gilberto, who sang “The Girl from Ipanema” so memorably, has died at the age of eighty-three. The New York Times has an obituary. Here, from 1963, are the album version and the single, with João Gilberto, guitar, vocal; Stan Getz, tenor; Antonio Carlos Jobim, piano; Tommy Williams, bass; and Milton Banana, drums. Also, a TV version, with Gary Burton on vibes. And a movie version, also with Burton. Music by Jobim, Portuguese lyrics by Vinícius de Moraes, English lyrics by Norman Gimbel.

When I was teaching, I always loved having the opportunity to expose students to necessary (imho) cultural stuff. Works of lit, obviously, but also movies and music. You’ve never seen Citizen Kane? You’ve never heard Bessie Smith? You’ve come to the right place. I sometimes took the opportunity to play “The Girl from Ipanema” when teaching Odyssey 13, the episode in which Odysseus sees the princess Nausicaa frolicking on the beach with her maids. I played the album version, with no introduction, for greater mystery and, when the English lyrics kicked in, greater amusement.

[Bessie Smith: as in “Bessie, bop, or Bach,” in Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B.” It’d be a terrible thing to read the poem without hearing all three.]

A new Nancy book

[Click for a larger view.]

A new book from Olivia Jaimes: Nancy Wins at Friendship (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2023). Mostly 2020 Nancy strips.

Olivia Jaimes is a brilliant successor to Ernie Bushmiller. The Family Ritz and friends are in good hands.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Two kinds of people

“There are two kinds of people in the world”: Bruce Springsteen explains why he cannot agree to an interview about the Fender Stratocaster (Letters of Note). Wonderful stuff.

Related reading
All OCA guitar posts (Pinboard)

[Me, acoustic guitars only, thank you.]

ATTN: Tim Cook

My surroundings already are “an infinite canvas.” I suspect that yours are too.

[I don’t discount the possible usefulness of a headset for people with vision troubles. But reality itself is already an infinite canvas.]

“White ladders”

A walk in the dark yields “a night of revelations.”

Steven Millhauser, “Clair de Lune,” in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

“NEVER CLOSED” Now with a link to an application to the National Register of Historic Places that teems with diner history.

“NEVER CLOSED”

[Munson Diner, 200 11th Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

From Michael Engle and Marlo Monti’s Diners of New York (Stackpole Books: Mechanicsburg, PA, 2008):

In 1921, Harry Zelin (born Samuel Zelinsky in Poland, in 1893) and his partner, Irving Greenman, rented space at 106 East 14th Street in Manhattan under the name Munson Lunch Company and started a quick lunch restaurant. After twenty-one years, Zelin opened his first restaurant at Greenwich and West Houston Streets, in the old Union Freight Terminal. In 1944, Zelin, under the name Delano Realty, acquired an existing old-style diner built in 1930 on the southwest corner of 49th Street and 11th Avenue. The following year he opened the Munson Diner, a new Kullman model with streamlined stainless steel and blue porcelain enamel flutes. He gradually added other diners and, by 1959, had at least five, including four on 11th Avenue: at 24th, 37th, 42nd Streets, and the aforementioned Munson Diner at 49th Street. Under the Delano Realty moniker, he brought a 1958 Silk City diner to 375 West Street, which was recently the Rib Restaurant, a now-closed barbecue joint.

The first restaurant: 588 Greenwich Street.

The older diner at the southwest corner of 49th and 11th: 681 11th Avenue.

The diner at the corner of 37th and 11th: 456-458 11th Avenue.

There’s no tax photograph for a 42nd and 11th location.

Diners ran in the Zelin and Greenman families: other family members owned three Market Diners and the Empire Diner. Here’s an elegy for the Market Diner at 43rd and 11th. Still going at 210 10th Avenue (under different ownership) is the Empire Diner. A tad upscale, no?

The Kullman diner at 681 11th (which replaced the diner in the photograph) is now in the Catskills, in Liberty, New York, living on as the New Munson Diner. Google Maps has it in its new location.

*

A reader passed on a link to an application to place the relocated Munson Diner in the National Register of Historic Places. The application’s thirty-seven pages are teeming with the history of that diner and of diners generally. Thanks, reader.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

“Bagels against th’ current”

In today’s Zippy, Dingburg seniors remember “th’ seventies,” when there was only one kind of bagel:

[Zippy, June 3, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[In truth, there have always been onion bagels. Black-and-white too, I think. Martinizing is a Zippy preoccupation. For instance.]