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“Happy Reunion,” four times Tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves again, in a 1971 performance. Great closeups of Duke Ellington and Gonsalves at work.

From Sonny Rollins’s notebooks

From The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins, ed. Sam V.H. Reese (New York Review Books, 2024). Four separate entries, widely separated in time:

Persevere I shall.

“Never miss a good chance to shut up.”
— a wise man on living life.

One day in the future people will be saying, “Yes, I once saw Sonny Rollins.”

No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up.

Related reading
All OCA Sonny Rollins posts (Pinboard)

[This volume might be of limited interest to a non-saxophonist: many, many entries are devoted to practice routines, scales, breathing, fingerings, and embouchure. If nothing else, those entries give a non-saxophonist an idea of how much work goes into producing a sound. Yet another example of why “close enough for jazz” is uninformed nonsense.]

Revised cosmology

It’s cicadas all the way down.

Another Alito flag

From The New York Times (gift link), “Another Provocative Flag Was Flown at Another Alito Home”:

Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.

This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

It is time for him to go. Thomas too.

A review: Anne Curzan, Says Who?

Anne Curzan, Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares about Words (New York: Crown, 2024). $29.

“Everyone who cares about words”: that would include me, and the first thing I had to think about when I sat down to type this review was how to punctuate that title: should a colon follow the question mark? I’ll look it up later.

In thirty-three short chapters, Anne Curzan, a linguist and University of Michigan professor, presents assorted matters of grammar, punctuation, usage, and style, with recommendations, what she calls a “bottom line,” for thinking about each. Again and again I found myself at odds with her perspective. Part of what put me off, wrongly or rightly, is the book's relentless cheeriness: the “kinder, funner ” of the title, the too-frequent use of exclamation points. An example chosen at random: “The apostrophe’s territory is said not to include marking plurals — except for the few cases where it does!”

A larger problem is Curzan’s division of the individual psyche into “grammando” and “wordie.” She borrows “grammando” (such a violent name) from a 2012 New York Times column: “One who constantly corrects others’ linguistic mistakes.” Notice that the grammando is cast only as a listener or reader, a cranky, “judgy” listener or reader who reacts to others’ misuses of language, wanting to shout “Wrong!” or pull out a red pen when a speaker or writer makes a mistake. She seems to forget that someone with a keen attention to language is first of all attentive to getting things right in their own speech and writing and to recognizing the standards appropriate to different forms of discourse.

In contrast to the “grammando,” a “wordie” is “someone who delights in language’s shifting landscape.” The “wordie” too is, at least primarily, a listener and reader, a generous and joyous one willing to accept what the “grammando” would regard as wrong. “Enjoy the humor of a well-placed figurative literal,” Curzan urges. But is the speaker or writer trying to be funny? “Be generous when you see a dangling or misplaced modifier in writing,” Curzan suggests. But if I see one in my own prose, dammit, I’m going to fix it. If someone says they “could care less,” Curzan reminds us that semantic change is “often interesting and fun to learn about.” And we might think of “the reason is because” not as redundancy but as “mirroring,” something “aesthetically pleasing.” As for bumbled apostrophes, “we all mess them up.” Yes, and some of us read our writing carefully and try to catch them, as of course Curzan herself does.

The “inner grammando” this book imagines in its reader must be, like Rick in Casablanca, misformed: advice in Says Who? often takes up questions and prohibitions that no one knowledgeable about language would recognize as genuine: whether ain’t is a word; whether and can begin a sentence; whether none must always be singular; whether a preposition can end a sentence. Advice about these matters at times proceeds from contradictory premises. With the Oxford comma, for instance, Curzan suggests that we might use it when it‘s useful and omit it when it isn’t. But to make singular nouns ending in -s possessive, she suggests always using -’s, because doing so means “fewer decisions to make.” Curzan here and there falls into the tricky “Jane Austen” fallacy, the idea that past usage legitimizes present usage. That Shakespeare wrote “between you and I” doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to do so today. As Curzan herself is always reminding the reader, language changes, so why invoke Shakespeare’s usage as legitimizing ours?

Curzan's attitude toward what she calls standardized English (in other words, the prestige dialect of English, what many would call Standard Written English) is also contradictory. She calls standardized English

the password to jobs and connections with lots of social and economic power. We as speakers, writers, readers, and listeners have the responsibility to decide if and how we want to change that password, which is a key goal of this book.

But one page later Curzan refers to those who understand “the formal, standardized written variety [of English] in the context of all the varieties of English out there” — which would seem to suggest that standardized English is here to stay.

I’d like to see that password made available to all American students, with excellent instruction in reading and writing from the earliest grades, instruction that honors a student’s home language(s) while never discounting the importance of the prestige dialect. As Bryan Garner says of “Standard English,” “without it, you won’t be taken seriously.”

A passage that sums up my quarrel with this book:

I think it is worth asking whether these feelings we harbor about the importance of getting our commas “right” and of getting them “right” in the same way each time are the best use of our time and energies.

Heck, at least one of the best uses.

I do like the footnote that Curzan appends to formal writing to explain her use of singular they :

I am choosing to use singular gender-neutral they in this text. It is the most widely used singular generic pronoun in the spoken language and provides a useful, inclusive, concise solution to the issue in the written language as well.

You may have noticed a singular they of mine in this post.

A related post
Anne Curzan and Bryan Garner on “the reason is because”

[About the book’s title: The copyright page shows a colon after the question mark. But The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed. at 14.96) says, “When a main title ends with a question mark or an exclamation point, no colon is added before any subtitle.” One observation about correcting other people’s language: notice that all OCA “How to improve writing” posts are about professional prose. And I don’t know anyone rude enough to correct speech in everyday life.]

“Mad Hot Cicada Spring”

Elaine wrote a short piece for piccolo and violin, “Mad Hot Cicada Spring.” Follow the link for the music and a MIDI file.

Inside info: This piece has a notated bit of birdsong from our backyard (played by the piccolo) that no birder of our acquaintance has been able to identify. I’m mentioning it just in case someone out there might recognize it.

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

I’m always slightly amazed at the way women in older movies appear to time-travel when their hair is wet. They lose their 1930s- or ’40s-ness and suddenly show up in the world of tomorrow. As is the case here, at least to my eyes.

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’m heading out to walk before it gets too hot and will drop a hint later if one is needed. Will one be needed? I really can’t tell.

*

Noon: I’ll drop a hint. This actor has something in common with a Spice Girl.

*

1:24 p.m.: Oh well. I put the answer in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” So I use actor.]

Planet of the monkey house

In Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, a Kurt Vonnegut book is visible on a table in what appears to be the residence of a human serving the apes. We know it’s a Vonnegut book: the human (Bill Macy) says “Vonnegut.” The cover isn’t readable, but it’s easy to guess what that book must be: Welcome to the Monkey House (1968).

The cover looks something like this.

Related reading
A handful of Kurt Vonnegut posts (Pinboard)

[Four sentences about this movie will arrive in the near far future. There are many movies ahead of it in the queue. Here I’ll say that Kingdom is visually stunning, kinda incoherent, far too long, and screaming sequel as it ends. Visually stunning makes it worth seeing.]

Mary Miller, shilling

East-central Illinois’s Mary Miller (IL-15) was one of the faithful yelling outside the courthouse today.

And someone in the crowd yelled back: “You’re shilling for a rapist!”

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

EXchange names fill the screen

[From Larceny (dir. George Sherman, 1948). Click for a much larger view.]

American primitive realism: the page fills the screen. Otherwise, you might not believe that someone is really looking at a telephone directory.

The page is a slapdash creation (“aYtes”), but CHina and UNderhill were authentic Los Angeles County exchange names.

Related reading
All OCA EXchange name posts (Pinboard)