Jeff Tweedy annotates Woody Guthrie

In The New York Times (gift link), Jeff Tweedy annotates Woody Guthrie’s “America Singing,” a prose piece published in the Times on April 4, 1943. An excerpt:

I think we need to get better at defining the stakes we face today. Because, while the people who are systematically dismantling our institutions and violating Americans’ rights don’t wear the uniforms of the Fascist Party, the consequences of their actions are similar to the ones Guthrie feared.

Guthrie’s piece, which I can see in its original form in ProQuest but not via the Times itself, appeared on a page titled “Music of the Times,” otherwise devoted to classical music. That might explain Guthrie’s seemingly out of the blue reference to “real honest classical music.”

The condescending subhead the Times added to Guthrie’s piece: “Author of ‘Bound for Glory’ Recalls What The Plain People Sing.”

Related reading
A handful of OCA Woody Guthrie posts (Pinboard)

Ghost in the Machine

From a PBS e-mail:

Ghost in the Machine is an investigative documentary exposing the buried history of artificial intelligence as a technology shaped by racism, misogyny, eugenics, and entrenched structures of power long before it entered everyday life.

Rejecting the notion of AI as inevitable or objective, the film traces how myths of progress and efficiency have obscured deeper political and cultural agendas, revealing the ideological foundations beneath the systems now reshaping modern society. Who built these systems, whose values do they encode, and who do they benefit?

The documentary, by filmmaker Valerie Veatch, airs on Independent Lens this coming Monday.

Which prompts me to paste here a comment that I left on an episode of the Mac Power Users podcast, “Harvard Professor Teddy Svoronos on AI in the Classroom”:

I found this a remarkably cheerful and uncritical discussion of generative AI, which has made the work of evaluating student writing a hellscape for many instructors. It’s telling that the University of Chicago has banned gen AI in first-year law courses and some undergrad courses. UC Berkeley has banned gen AI in all law courses. Harvard, though, is all in, encouraging faculty to use gen AI and offering a $699 course in entrepreneurship taught by AI clones of business faculty. At the same time, Harvard has closed its Writing Center, where a student could work one-to-one with another human. Arizona State is repackaging course materials in bits and pieces for use in online course offerings. At SUNY Buffalo, the Chief AI Officer has advanced the idea of having a chatbot give students oral exams. And Texas Tech is using AI to comb through syllabi for suspect texts (anything foregrounding sexual orientation or gender identity).

There are many, many questions to ask here, and a need for a much more critical perspective.

[A habitual OCA reader will recognize that most of my examples come from recent posts.]

Oceans 47

The current occupant, just now:

“So if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean, so maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change ’em both.”

The only question in response: why do things like this to an ally? Because, he said, Canadians are “nasty people.”

I wish someone had pressed: but why oceans? Surely they matter to many other nations too. When you will be making these decisions? And how will you choose the names? They can’t both be the American Ocean. And why haven’t you renamed the Strait of Hormuz?

I think journalists would do well to ask straight-faced questions about these absurdities. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, “Don’t hide the madness.”

[Context: the occupant has renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America.]

Car bars

Elaine and I were headed toward Staples when we noticed two women parked in front of the store, struggling to fit a swiveling task chair into the back of a BMW. “Do you need a hand?” I asked, having had some experience fitting similar chairs into similar spaces.

They did need a hand, but not in the way I had assumed. They had the rear seats folded down and were trying to figure out how to remove the bar behind those seats so that they could slide the chair all the way in. One was looking at the BMW owner’s manual, which offered the tersest guidance: “Press the release button.” Which would be where, exactly? Four of us looked at the bar, both ends, and none of us could figure it out.

A fifth person was on her way into Staples. I figured I'd ask if she knew how to remove the bar. She had no idea. A man was on his way into Staples. He too had no idea. We all stood around.

It was sheer luck that one of BMW women did something — what? — and the bar popped out, and two of us pushed the chair in.

This afternoon Elaine and I looked at our new vehicle, a hybrid Toyota RAV4, to see if we could figure out its bar. And we did, but it’s a much less intuitive bar than the bar in our now-gone 2010 Prius. The RAV4 bar is called a luggage cover, though I think that name should more properly apply to the cover that pulls out from the bar to hide worldly possessions.

I like our RAV4 — a lot, really a lot — but everything about it is less intuitive. I’ve yet to look up the Hold button in the thick manual, even thicker, I think, than the BMW’s.

[RAV4 ? It means “Recreational Active Vehicle with 4-wheel drive.” Apple Dictation and Slide to Type both rendered the name correctly the first time out. God knows what a RAV4 will cost with higher tariffs.]

Writing and AI at Harvard

At The Atlantic (gift link), Tyler Austin Harper writes about “Why the Closing of Harvard’s Writing Center Matters.” He suspects that Harvard’s decision will give other schools permission to close their writing centers:

The decisions that Harvard makes create a permission structure for other institutions to follow suit — after all, if one of the most venerable schools in the country doesn’t need a writing center in order to be “elite,” why would a public university, or a regional liberal-arts college, or a community college need one?

I see it differently: I think that emphasizing the presence of a writing center might offer a lower-tier school a smart and snarky way to present itself to prospective students. On a campus tour, for instance: “This building also houses our writing center. As you may know, Harvard University recently got rid of its writing center. Unlike Harvard, we still have a writing center, because we believe that students benefit from working on their writing with another human being, not with a chatbot.”

As Harper points out, Harvard is all in on AI. A development that just made the news, postdating his essay: Harvard is now selling a course on entrepreneurship “taught” by AI replicas of business faculty (The New York Times , gift link). Only $699!

The prose of Harvard’s unrelated Teach with Generative AI page (AI-generated prose?) does not inspire confidence. For instance:

Harvard has consistently tried to embrace new technology across our classrooms, residential and virtual. GenAI has been no different.

It’d be Harvard that’s been no different, not AI.

Behold, a fused sentence:

Faculty and students have access to a range of tools. Some of these tools are free and open to all faculty, students and staff behind Harvard Key (Harvard Sandbox) other tools require a license or approval.

My favorite:

Out of this there have been several learnings worth considering.

And I’m sure there’ll be many more.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Ben Zimmer, wildly difficult. Daily puzzles — Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, the syndicated New York Times — seem to me increasingly easy. I can often do an entire puzzle, or nearly an entire puzzle, from Across clues alone. But the Saturday Stumper seems to get more and more difficult and unfun. Humph.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, five letters, “Little-used.” This clue starts the puzzle off with a bang: three or four different letters could plausibly fill the answer’s first square.

1-D, eight letters, “Social media ‘Spare me your replies.’” Never heard of the answer. I must need to partake of more social media. Oh, wait — I don’t.

2-D, fifteen letters, “Signals profound change.” Surprisingly easy to see.

4-D, four letters, “Barcelona bros.” Yes, but. Pretty arcane, imho. 1-D!

8-D, fifteen letters, “Unforgettable, in a way.” I liked this one.

10-A, six letters, “Papers’ attention-getter.” I thought it had to be a slang term for a giant headline.

19-A, nine letters, “Weird Al parodied it with ‘Bologna’ (1979).” Good grief.

25-A, six letters, “What the first jeans were, per its etymology.” I was sure the answer had to do with Nîmes and denim , but nothing would fit, not even after I took a seamripper to the grid.

26-D, letters, “Wellington museum models.” Can you tell that I found this puzzle exasperating?

40-A, seven letters, “Slide-show subjects.” Cute. The clue, not the subjects.

42-A, six letters, “Legendary rock singers.” Rock on.

44-A, four letters, “Name on a Scotch bottle above a clipper ship.” I know it, but there is no reason anyone in 2026 should be expected to know it.

My favorite in this puzzle:

30-A, eight letters, “Seller of Tova cosmetics to QVC (2002).” Because it’s utterly bizarre and patently ridiculous — and because it was my starting point in the puzzle.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Fortnite, Harry Potter, &c.

Natalie Wexler, co-author with Judith Hochman of The Writing Revolution, writes about how Alpha School, a private-school network that relies on AI instruction, teaches writing. Long story short: Alpha School borrowed (or co-opted?) the model of The Writing Revolution, known as the Hochman Method, and called it AlphaWrite:

It’s possible that AlphaWrite could do a good job of teaching writing. But the app’s creators have overlooked a crucial component of the Hochman Method: it’s designed to be embedded in curriculum content. AlphaWrite, in contrast, is ... “embedded in content that matters to students.” And the model assumes that the content that “matters to students” is anything but the content of the curriculum.

Instead, AlphaWrite encourages students to write about their personal interests.

AlphaWrite’s suggestions, for students who need them: Fortnite, Harry Potter, Social Media, Video Games, Basketball.

Imagine being the lucky teacher who gets to read those essays. Oh, wait — there is no teacher. It’s all AI.

Peg Tyre’s 2012 Atlantic article “The Writing Revolution” is still necessary reading for anyone who cares about the teaching of writing.

A related post
AI school

Catchphrases and all

Elaine and I have been made honorary characters, at least on paper, in the world of Animal Crossing.

Elaine’s clothing: green sweater and dress. Her catchphrase: “Isn't that cool.” Her personality: sweet.

My clothing: polo shirt. My catchphrase: “You always need a pencil.” My personality: smug.

These attributes were chosen for us, with the exception of smug, which I chose when presented with a small list of options. (Jock didn’t fit.)

Simon Willison’s advice for bloggers

Via Daring Fireball: tech developer Simon Willison offers observations and advice about blogging.

Willison’s advice for someone getting started:

Just start. It’s so easy to get caught in the trap of obsessing over the design of your blog, and planning for content that you never actually get around to writing. As long as each entry has a date on it and a permanent URL, it counts as a blog.

Excellent advice. It reminds me of what my daughter Rachel suggested when I started out:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say ‘This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.’”

Willison also suggests not worrying about readership:

Don’t worry if nobody reads it. People are unlikely to stumble on your blog organically, but what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers.

Here too I agree. Thinking of a blog post as a message in a bottle can be a useful mental trick when putting something on the Internets. One sends off the bottle in the hope that somebody somewhere will find it. And that can happen. Bottle after bottle.

A piece of advice with which I can’t agree:

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

I’m always tinkering with posts new and old, even when they may appear to be fine as they are. As I wrote in a 2013 post, I think about writing

as the work of the 職人 [shokunin], the craftsman, whose overriding concern is getting things right, making things better, not for material gain but for the sake of the work.

I’m with Aaron Draplin (quoted in that same post):

“I’m not gonna let it go knowing that I could’ve made it better.”

Besides, what example would I have been setting for my students if I believed in lowering my own standards? Gah!

And besides, not all flaws are invisible. I know, because I get comments: “No need to post this, but shouldn’t the third sentence read,” &c. And I’m always grateful for those comments.

Related reading
All OCA blogging posts (Pinboard)

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois , August 12, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

I don’t go looking for trouble: it finds me .

I defy any close reader to make full sense of the background in this panel from today’s Hi and Lois . The looming black triangle is a standard Hi-Lo Amalgamated feature — I cannot object to its appearance here. The blue must be a wall; the green, the floor of a room devoid of furniture; the purple, another floor. The white must be a surprisingly large cased opening. The light-purple area must be a tile or faux-tile wall. The lined light-blue surface must be the side of a kitchen cabinet; the light-brown strip, a countertop edge. But the line that appears to mark the cabinet’s side from its front doesn’t align with the line that appears to mark the countertop’s side edge from its front edge. I’m reminded of the Escher-like hot-dog stand I noticed in my early days as a close reader of this comic strip.

A strip need not have the precise minimalism of Nancy or the intensity of detail of Zippy to be satisfying. But a comic kitchen ought to look better than this one.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Still a diner

[518 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Finally: out of East Williamsburg, and not only are there sidewalks — there’s a diner.

The Kellogg Diner opened in 1928. The photograph captures the installation of a neon sign — a momentous occasion for any concern. (Recall The Best Years of Our Lives, in which returning vet Homer Parrish notices that his uncle’s tavern, Butch’s Place, now has a neon sign: modernity strikes.) Click for the much larger view and you’ll see a wealth of other details. Find the pie. And Irene. And “Boy, it’s a honey.” And the Luckies. But remember: Smoking Is Not Permitted.

The diner, reborn as Kellogg’s Diner, continues at this corner, though the menu is a considerable step up from ordinary diner fare. And the diner now takes reservations.

Some background:

“NYC’s iconic, 95-year-old Kellogg’s Diner goes bankrupt, seeks buyer to fork over hefty $2.5 million” (New York Post ).

“A Star Is Reborn: Kellogg’s Diner Is Revamped as a Tex-Mex Triumph” (BKMAG).

“Everything You Need to Know About the New Kellogg’s Diner” (Resy).

“Kellogg’s Diner Lives On With Jackie Carnesi at the Helm” (The New York Times , gift link).

“My All-Nighter in a Vanishing World: the 24-Hour Diner” (The New York Times, gift link).

Related posts
All OCA diner posts : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Nolan’s Odyssey

Have I seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey ? No, not yet, though I expect that I’ll end up seeing it. But I’m in no rush.

So much of what I’ve seen of  the movie is a matter of special effects and spectacle. But almost everything of the supernatural wonderland of Odysseus’s wanderings — monsters and goddesses and ghosts, killers and seducers and the war dead — is present in the poem only in a long night of storytelling (books nine through twelve), as Odysseus performs for his Phaeacian hosts in his role as a man of constant sorrow. Monsters and goddesses and ghosts are, really, the least typical elements in the poem.

The Odyssey is much more about, in a phrase that I’ll borrow out of context from the poet Kenneth Koch, “the pleasures of peace”: storytelling, hospitality, food and drink, baths, dance, music, poetry, a family reunion, lovemaking, and taking what Homer calls “the gift of sleep” in one‘s own bed. Henry Fielding aptly called the Odyssey “that eating poem,” and the eating poem is barely underway before Telemachus welcomes the incognito Athena into his oikos with food and wine.

Food and wine and the forms of hospitality: those are the poem’s real special effects. So I can wait.

See also “My dad is coming home.”

*

Spoiler alert: In The Guardian , Chris Tryhorn details ways in which the movie differs from Homer: “Sex, beds and grisly executions: what Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey changed, invented – and left out.”

No Phaeacians?! No test of the bed? Maybe I don’t need to see this movie after all.

Related reading
All OCA Odyssey posts (Pinboard)

[I don’t want to sentimentalize the poem: the pleasures of peace are fully attained only after Odysseus, Telemachus, and two loyal herdsmen slaughter the suitors in a frenzy of comic violence. (Pow! Oof!) And then Telemachus presides over the execution of the household’s disloyal maids.]

Bad cess

From Born to Kill (dir. Robert Wise, 1947). Helen (Claire Trevor) has come to threaten Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard): don’t go to the police, or else. Having issued her threat, she turns to leave. Mrs. Kraft follows her to the door:

“Wait — I’d be a bad hostess if I didn’t see you out.”

[She spits on Helen’s shoulder. Helen is unfazed. ]

“Bad cess to me?”

“No need for me to say it. You carry your own curse inside of ya.”

We thought we were mishearing it, but no. Merriam-Webster explains bad cess . M-W has it as chiefly Irish and dates it to 1808. The OED has it as Anglo-Irish, with a first citation from 1859. No relation to cesspool.

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Wait — is that? (Checks IMDb.) It is.

Leave your guess(es) in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

*

No need for a hint: the answer is in the comments.

Related reading
All OCA mystery actor posts (Pinboard)

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel, Internet Archive, TCM, YouTube.]

I Walk Alone (dir. Byron Haskin, 1947). “Don’t worry about me, Kay — I just got out of prison, not college”: Frankie Madison (Burt Lancaster) just did fourteen years, and he’s come back to Manhattan to get the half-of-everything that his partner in crime Noll Turner (Kirk Douglas) promised him. The problem is that Noll (aka Dink) isn’t okay with that, and Frankie’s pal Dave (Wendell Corey), now Noll’s accountant, is in a tough spot, wanting to do right by Frankie, but in thrall to the boss. And then there’s Kay Lawrence (Lizabeth Scott), a singer and pianist “mentored” by Noll, who feels her loyalties shifting. A solid film noir that becomes surprisingly brutal in its final scenes, and another movie from what seems to be our household’s favorite year in movies. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Lydia (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1941). Merle Oberon stars as Lydia MacMillan, a wealthy woman, founder of an orphanage, never married, reunited in old age (excellent makeup) and in flashbacks with her suitors: a doctor (Joseph Cotten), a football hero (George Reeves), an acclaimed pianist (Hans Jaray), and a seafarer (Alan Marshal). There’s something Stefan Zweig-like about this story — a love story, yes, but ultimately a parable about self-knowledge. But you have to be willing to get past some over-the-top dialogue (by Ben Hecht and Samuel Hoffenstein). To wit: “This love, love that’s part of the hot sun and the salt water, it’s like a feast that leaves you hungrier than a winter wolf.” ★★★★ (CC)

*

Deathtrap (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1982). Well, it was there, on what is now known as Live TV, so we set it to record, watched from the last half hour or so, and went back to the beginning. Clever fun, with one surprise after another. Michael Caine is a playwright with a new flop to his credit; Dyan Cannon, his fragile wife; Christopher Reeve, his promising student; Irene Worth, the psychic next door. If you haven’t watched it for many years, it’s unlikely that you’ll remember all the tricks. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Good Sam (dir. Leo McCarey, 1948). Gary Cooper and Ann Sheridan star as Sam and Lu Clayton: he, a department-store manager and friend to all in need; she, a put-upon homemaker who finds her husband’s charity to all comers erasing their family’s hope for a better future (spoiler: he’s secretly given away the money they’d been saving toward a house). It’s a poor man’s It’s a Wonderful Life (no pun intended), complete with an ending in which money makes everything okay. Hard to understand how the director responsible for Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) could be responsible for this awkward, unfunny comedy. I’m not surprised to see that it appeared on the The New York Times list (December 26, 1948) of the ten worst movies of the year. ★★ (YT)

*

The Dark Man (dir. Jeffrey Dell, 1951). Molly (Natasha Perry), an actor cycling to work at a provincial theater, hears gunshots and sees a tall man in a dark trenchcoat (Maxwell Reed) in a field — and now her life is in danger. A distinct Hitchcock flavor here, but also some dumb plot points. A greater flaw: a marked absence of characterization and an unconvincing instant romance between Molly and the craggy detective inspector (Edward Underwood) assigned to the case. Adding interest: the manhunt on an artillery range. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Man Who Talked Too Much (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1940). It turned out that we had seen the 1955 remake Illegal, with Edward G. Robinson and Nina Foch. Here George Brent stars as Steven M. Forbes, a prosecutor who goes into private practice (with Virginia Bruce as his secretary Joan Reed) after sending an innocent man to the chair. Forbes’s few clients pay him in apples and cheese, but his showmanship in the courtroom draws the interest of gangsters, and he soon goes over to the dark side, making real money while hiding evidence that would convict a murderer. As his kid brother John L. (William Lundigan) tells him, “You’re not a criminal lawyer, Steve; you’re a lawyer criminal” — and the mob then sets up John L. to take the blame for a murder. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Wait for Your Laugh (dir. Jason Wise, 2017). An affectionate documentary about Rose Marie (1923–2017), a radio and vaudeville star at the age of three, a performer on records and film not long after, a nightclub entertainer in adulthood, an actor who achieved her greatest fame as Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show and became a regular on The Hollywood Squares. Here Rose Marie talks at length about her childhood, her brushes with the underworld in Chicago and Las Vegas (Al Capone was “Uncle Al”), her blissful but short-lived marriage, and the frustrations of TDVDS (she thought that the emphasis was always going to be on the writers) and 4 Girls 4 (spoiler: no one liked Helen O’Connell). Saddest line: “Nobody does a good act anymore,” evoking a lost world of showbiz, when an act was a blend of patter, jokes, song, and dance. With commentary from Peter Marshall, Carl Reiner, Dick Van Dyke and others. ★★★★ (A)

[Rose Marie’s early film efforts surface here and there on YouTube, but archive.org has all her early recordings.]

*

Tomorrow Is Forever (dir. Irving Pichel, 1946). Orson Welles and Claudette Colbert star in a story of the sorrows of war: he, John Andrew MacDonald, goes off to fight in the Great War; she, his wife Elizabeth, receives news of his death, discovers that she’s pregnant, and marries Lawrence Hamilton (George Brent), who becomes a happy stepfather. But John wasn’t killed: he was wounded, so badly that he needed facial reconstruction, though there’s also a strong implication that his wound is something like that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes. When John returns to the States after twenty years as an Austrian scientist with a new name, he cannot bring himself to let Elizabeth know his true identity — or is his earlier self still his true identity? A grim, grim movie: imagine Odysseus coming back and never letting Penelope know who he is. ★★★ (A)

*

A Dispatch from Reuters (William Dieterle, 1940). Yes, there was a Reuter, Julius Reuter (Edward G. Robinson), whose name is here often pronounced “Rooter” for comic effect. Reuter begins with a carrier pigeon service, beating the mail at carrying messages and news reports. And then of course comes the telegraph. Sad to say, it’s a dull movie, whose main moment of drama is the death of a pigeon (electrocuted by a telegraph wire) — at least until Abraham Lincoln is assassinated, and the race to be first with the news is on. ★★ (TCM)

*

Kind Lady (dir. John Sturges, 1951). Mary Herries (Ethel Barrymore) is the kind, wealthy, forthright, art-loving, widowed or never married lady who opens her door to Henry Elcott (Maurice Evans), a struggling (natch) painter. And before long, Henry and his criminal associates (Betsy Blair, Angela Lansbury, and Keenan Wynn) begin to sell off the house’s furniture and paintings while Mary and her maid are locked up in bedrooms. Henry is a monstrous piece of work, cheerfully calling Mary “Aunt Mary” and dominating his wife (Blair), who seems more like a member of a tiny cult than a spouse. But Mary is a tough cookie, and though I don’t know enough to judge whether this movie is Ethel Barrymore’s finest hour, I will nevertheless say that it is. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Kind Lady (dir. George B. Seitz, 1935). It turned out that we had seen a remake of a movie adapted from a play (by Edward Chodorov) that was itself adapted from a short story (by Hugh Walpole). Here Mary Herries (Aline MacMahon) is a much younger woman who seems susceptible to the charms of the dashing painter Henry Abbott (Basil Rathbone), who’s not nearly as menacing as Maurice Evans’s Henry Elcott. And MacMahon plays a character not nearly as resourceful as Ethel Barrymore’s Mary. Now I wonder which movie was more faithful to its sources. ★★ (IA)

*

Big City (dir. Frank Borzage, 1937). This movie seems at odds with itself: it’s a proletarian drama of independent cab drivers fighting the thugs trying to put them out of business (there’s a bombing, a murder, and a threat of deportation), but there’s also plenty of sexy comedy, a scene in which a cabbie drinks an entire bottle of milk, and a battle royal of cabbies and banquet guests that pulls the movie into absurdity. Spencer Tracy and Luise Rainer star as Joe and Anna Benton, a New York City cab driver and his incredibly chic wife. The most unusual element in this movie: the banquet guests include Jack Dempsey, Jim Jeffries, Jim Thorpe, and other athletic greats (Wikipedia has them all). ★★★ (TCM)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Oh, that guy

If you need more reasons not to watch CBS, The New York Times has several (gift link):

In a bid to remake the country’s top-rated news program, Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, on Thursday unveiled an overhaul of 60 Minutes , replacing the show’s executive producer with a tech journalist and firing two of its on-air correspondents.

Ms. Weiss named Nick Bilton, a former New York Times technology columnist and a filmmaker who has directed and produced documentaries for HBO and Netflix, as her pick to lead the 58-year-old Sunday show. Mr. Bilton, who has never worked in traditional broadcast news, will replace Tanya Simon, who had been at the show for more than three decades.

CBS News also fired Cecilia Vega, the program’s first Latina correspondent, and Sharyn Alfonsi, whose segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons was pulled off the air abruptly last year by Ms. Weiss, who requested more reporting. It aired in full at a later date. Draggan Mihailovich, the executive editor of 60 Minutes , was also fired, as was Matthew Polevoy, a senior producer.

The name Nick Bilton sounded familiar, and I figured out why: I noticed the name in 2013, when Bilton wrote a piece for the Times about digital etiquette. In it, he said that he didn’t like getting thank-you e-mails and that people should should use Google Maps rather than ask for directions. He said that he and his mother communicated “mostly through Twitter” and that his father learned a “lesson” after leaving a dozen voice mails for his son that went unheard. I had some thoughts about that column.

In 2014, Bilton wrote a piece announcing that the pen was dead, having been replaced by the finger. I had some thoughts about that column too. I’ll quote myself: “I guess Nick Bilton doesn’t believe in thank-you notes either. Or love letters.”

*

June 4: Bilton’s tenure at 60 Minutes thus far portends that the venerable show is doomed.

Nightly tabloid news

I need to learn to Just Say No. The next time I’m tempted to watch the evening news on commercial television, I will remind myself of the headlines that began last night’s ABC World News Tonight :

~ Multiple Fatalities in Fatal Plant “Rupture”
~ Pilot Declares Medical Emergency During Landing
~ Massive Home Blast Rocks Neighborhood
~ 30+M Under Dangerous Flood Threat
~ Trump Visits Doctor Amid Iran Tensions
~ CDC Seeking Volunteers for Ebola Screening
~ Critical Senate Race Runoff
~ Knicks Await Final Opponent
~ Urgent Search For Children
~ Bounce House Scare
~ Woman Killed by Umbrella
~ Teenager Bitten by Shark While Fishing
~ America Strong

And without a headline: “And we remember a jazz great tonight.”

I gave up after the bounce house. (No children were in the house.) I checked this morning and saw that the America Strong segment, about a kid who faltered while singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a softball game (and, surprise, the crowd helped him out) ran for 1:46. Sonny Rollins got seventeen seconds. And not much of “the world” in that broadcast at all.

And events at the immigrant detention center Delaney Hall got nothing. (Is it a concentration camp yet?)

Clarence Williams’s house

[171-37 108th Avenue, Jamaica, Queens, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

A fellow lover of the music asked me if I knew the address for Clarence Williams, who lived across the street from James P. Johnson. I didn’t, nor did I know that Williams and Johnson were neighbors. But no. 171-37 was Williams’s house. The address is in his New York Times obituary.

Clarence Williams (1893 or 1898–1965), pianist, composer, and record producer, was a ubiquitous presence on blues and jazz 78s in the 1920s and ’30s, and another of the eminent Black Americans in music and sport who made Queens their home. (Wikipedia has Williams and his wife Eva Taylor living in Queens from the 1920s.) Among Williams’s credits as composer or co-composer: “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” “Cake Walking Babies from Home,” “Royal Garden Blues,” “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do,” “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” and “Sugar Blues.”

Here are just two samples of Williams on record:

From 1925, “Cake Walking Babies from Home” (Williams–Chris Smith–Henry Troy), by Clarence Williams’ Blue Five: Williams, piano; Eva Taylor (Mrs. Williams), vocal; Louis Armstrong, cornet; Sidney Bechet, soprano saxophone; Charlie Irvis, trombone; Buddy Christian, banjo. At 1:32 you can hear the piano preparing the charge into the last two choruses, in which Armstrong and Bechet take over.

And from 1929, “I’m Wild About That Thing” (Spencer Williams), with Bessie Smith and Eddie Lang (guitar). I love the way Smith’s performance builds in intensity from a sedate beginning. Williams takes it up a notch at the start of the sixth chorus. And as I wrote in a 2005 post, “Lang’s obbligato practically dances it way off the record.”

If you’re wondering, Williams was the grandfather of the actor Clarence Williams III. The resemblance was strong.

And if you’re wondering why address numbers in Queens are hyphenated, here’s an explanation.

Also in the Queens tax photographs: Fats Waller’s house. Like the Johnson house and the Waller house, no. 171-37 still stands.

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

[If you click for large, you’ll see that what appear to be holes in the fencing are shadows from the basement windows. I’d prefer Williams’s as the possessive at all times, but the record identifies the band as Clarence Williams’ Blue Five.]

A day in the life of a failing democracy

I think I learn more about what’s happening in our country from one installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American than from an hour or more of televised news. And there’s no need for anyone to say “Look at this.”

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its eleventh year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read:

From the Penguin Little Black Classics series, nos. 3 through 80:

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue

Thomas De Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts

Friedrich Nietzsche, Aphorisms on Love and Hate

John Ruskin, Traffic

Pu Songling, Wailing Ghosts

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Three Tang Dynasty Poets

Walt Whitman, On the Beach at Night Alone

Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

Baltasar Gracián, How to Use Your Enemies

John Keats, The Eve of St Agnes

Thomas Hardy, Woman Much Missed

Guy de Maupassant, Femme Fatale

Marco Polo, Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls

Suetonius, Caligula

Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and Medea

Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Petronius, Trimalchio’s Feast

Johann Peter Hebel, How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light

Hans Christian Andersen, The Tinder Box

Rudyard Kipling, The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows

Dante, Circles of Hell

Henry Mayhew, Of Street Piemen

Hafez, The nightingales are drunk

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath

Michel de Montaigne, How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing

Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night

Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart

Mary Kingsley, A Hippo Banquet

Jane Austen, The Beautifull Cassandra

Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Well, they are gone, and here must I remain

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings

Charles Dickens, The Great Winglebury Duel

Herman Melville, The Maldive Shark

Elizabeth Gaskell, The Old Nurse’s Story

Nikolay Leskov, The Steel Flea

Honoré de Balzac, The Atheist’s Mass

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

C.P. Cavafy, Remember, Body...

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Meek One

Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Heart

Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

Samuel Pepys, The Great Fire of London

Edith Wharton, The Reckoning

Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet

Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, My Dearest Father

Plato, Socrates’ Defence

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market

Sindbad the Sailor

Sophocles, Antigone We substituted Peter Woodruff’s translation for Robert Fagles’s.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, The Life of a Stupid Man

Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need?

Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci

Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime

Shen Fu, The Old Man of the Moon

Aesop, The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon

Matsuo Bashō, Lips too chilled

Emily Brontë, The Night is Darkening Round Me

Joseph Conrad, To-morrow

Richard Hakluyt, The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe

Kate Chopin, A Pair of Silk Stockings

Charles Darwin, It was snowing butterflies

Brothers Grimm, The Robber Bridegroom

Catullus, I Hate and I Love

Homer, Circe and the Cyclops

D. H. Lawrence, Il Duro

Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill

Ovid, The Fall of Icarus

Sappho, Come Close We substituted Mary Barnard’s and Stanley Lombardo’s translations for Aaron Poochigian's New Formalist translation.

Ivan Turgenev, Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands

Virgil, O Cruel Alexis

H. G. Wells, A Slip under the Microscope

Herodotus, The Madness of Cambyses

Speaking of Śiva

The Dhammapada

And several non-littles:

Honoré de Balzac, The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Kenkō, Essays in Idleness

Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, This Is Not a Novel

Herman Melville, The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles

Thanks to the translators who brought many of these works to us: Katrina C. Attwood, Mary Barnard, George Bull, Nigel Cliff, Archibald Colquhoun, Carol Cosman, Dick Davis, Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, Robert Fagles, Richard Freeborn, Robert Graves, John Hibberd and Nicholas Jacobs, Mary M. Innes, Kimberly Johnson, Donald Keene, Guy Lee, Stanley Lombardo, David Luke, Meredith McKinney, Siân Miles, John Minford, Samuel Moore, Tiina Nunnally, Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui, E.V. Rieu, Jeremy Robbins, G.W. Robinson and Arthur Cooper, Jay Rubin, Elisabeth Stopp, J.P. Sullivan, Robert and Olivia Temple, Peter Whigham, Ronald Wilks, and Peter Woodruff.

We are now making our way through Dickens’s Bleak House.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. Many books. Really many!