Overheard

Neighbor Aber, on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood:

I'll deconstruct this landing place later.

Yes, I sometimes watch a few minutes of Mister Rogers for old times' sake.

Perfect Etiquette (1879)

Moving books between my home and my office, I rediscovered a pamphlet that I bought some years ago at a library sale: Perfect Etiquette; Or, How to Behave in Society. A Complete Manual for Ladies and Gentlemen, Embracing Hints on Introduction, Salutation, Conversation, Friendly Visits, Social Parties, On the Street, In Public Places, In Traveling, Driving and Riding, Letter Writing, At the Table, Making and Receiving Presents, Courtship, Wedding Etiquette, Christening, Funerals, Etc., with Suggestions How to Dress Tastefully. The Toilette, With Simple Recipes for Improving the Complexion, etc. (New York: E.G. Rideout & Co., 1879). It appears to be the cheapest of paperbacks, the pages stapled, the cover nothing more than another page. Yet the 1879 pages are virtually free of foxing, which is more than I can say for paperbacks that I bought as an undergraduate in the 1970s.

Here are three entries from Perfect Etiquette. About the salad oil, I will add the usual disclaimer: do not try this at home.

Our Hair.
A good head of hair is the pride of every one, and to be kept in order, it should be brushed often and carefully. The brush should be of medium hardness, and the hair should be divided, so as the scalp should be brushed also, and all the scurf taken away.

Pure unscented salad oil is all that is required for the hair, and this should be applied with the hands, and rubbed off with flannel before going to bed, so as not to stain the pillow.

Bald Heads.
The covering of the head is one of the natural causes of baldness which is found more often in men than women; and whenever it is noticed coming on, the silk hat ought to be dispensed with and a straw one substituted.

The Beard.
Those who shave do well; but those who do not do better. If nature intended for men to shave, she would not have been so lavish in providing them with beards, and it is best for men not to shave at all, for nothing adds to the beauty of man so much as a full flowing beard.

SMiLE v. Pet Sounds

Brian Wilson, in one of the interview excerpts in the 2-dvd set Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE:

Well, Pet Sounds everybody liked of course. People love Pet Sounds. But if you want to put it on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give Pet Sounds a 4 and SMiLE a 10.

Of course, if you already think of Pet Sounds as a 10, that makes SMiLE a 25!

Duke and Ella, corrected

My dad clips and annotates and sends me error-filled articles by youthful journalists who evidently know very little about jazz (which alas doesn't stop them from writing about it). Here are two errors, from a brief profile of Atlantic Records' Ahmet Ertegun that appeared in the Record, a New Jersey newspaper. The writer is one Elle Govea. The first error concerns Duke Ellington:

Ertegun's musical ear introduced him to legendary performers long before they became famous. He told New York magazine of seeing Duke Ellington play at the London Palladium in 1933.

Now, if Duke Ellington had crossed the Atlantic to play the London Palladium, wouldn't that strongly suggest that he was already famous? Here's an excerpt from the uncredited front-page story that appeared in Britain's Melody Maker on June 17, 1933:

Well! he's here! We have been reading about the Duke this last four or five years; he has become an almost legendary figure; it seemed impossible that we should ever see him in the flesh, or hear those amazing sounds other than via a gramophone. Yet, unbelievably, he is here. (From The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker.)

Note: almost legendary.

How difficult would it have been to work this out? Not very. A Google search for duke ellington and 1933 turns up, as the fifth hit, a page with the biographical summary sections from Tucker's book. Just glancing at them would let one know that by 1933 Ellington was indeed famous.

The other error involves Ella Fitzgerald:

Ahmet recalled . . . that he was the first person to ask for an autograph from Ella Fitzgerald (then just a teenager), when she was a backup singer for Chick Webb.

My dad, with admirable restraint, has simply underlined the word backup. Ella Fitzgerald was a singer with Chick Webb. I wonder whether Govea was confusing Chick Webb with Cab Calloway. Or perhaps she assumed that a singer with someone else's "band" must be a backup singer. Good grief!

There's nothing wrong with making mistakes. But it's another thing to make mistakes in print, and in a context (the "entertainment" section) in which corrections are unlikely to appear. A proper respect for reality (and for Duke and Ella) makes me feel it appropriate to make the corrections here.

John Holt on learning and difficulty

The idea of "simplified classics" made me recall some observations from John Holt:

The bright child is patient. He can tolerate uncertainty and failure, and will keep trying until he gets an answer. When all his experiments fail, he can even admit to himself and others that for the time being he is not going to get an answer. This may annoy him, but he can wait. Very often, he does not want to be told how to do the problem or solve the puzzle he has struggled with, because he does not want to be cheated out of the chance to figure it out for himself in the future. . . .

The bright child is willing to go ahead on the basis of incomplete understanding and information. He will take risks, sail uncharted seas, explore when the landscape is dim, the landmarks few, the light poor. To give only one example, he will often read books he does not understand in the hope that after a while enough understanding will emerge to make it worth while to go on. In this spirit some of my fifth graders tried to read Moby Dick. . . .

We adults destroy most of the intellectual and creative capacity of children by the things we do to them or make them do. We destroy this capacity above all by making them afraid, afraid of not doing what other people want, of not pleasing, of making mistakes, of failing, of being wrong. Thus we make them afraid to gamble, afraid to experiment, afraid to try the difficult and the unknown.

From How Children Fail (1964)

Simplified classics?

From an article by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in today's Wall Street Journal on a new series of "simplified classics," "retold using simpler words":

The books have won praise of a number of educators. Peggy Charren, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an advocate for higher quality children's media, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, said she has read several of the books. "I was worried because they are truncated, but they're terrific," she said. "For some kids with reading problems, picture books may be as far as they get. But when they can make sense out of symbols on the page, you want them to have to the option of reading something wonderful, like a classic."

Jeffrey Goldstein, a psychologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands who specializes in children and media, said he thinks the series is a useful way of making the classics accessible to kids who might otherwise not be able to read them. "It's extraordinarily important for children to feel that they have access to literature," said Mr. Goldstein. "As a teacher you want children to enjoy reading and feel connected to other people who have read these books." The substitution of contemporary shorter words for 19th-century English words is less important than the fact that kids are being exposed to classic literature that their parents might have read, he added.

But several schools that teach kids with reading disabilities say they're emphasizing classics in the original text and won't be buying copies for their classrooms.

One academic institution says kids with reading issues may do better with the originals. "Just because you have reading problems doesn't mean you can't appreciate complex thought and complex language," says Maureen Sweeney, assistant head and director of admissions of the Windward School, an independent nonprofit school in White Plains, N.Y., for children who have language-based learning disabilities. Ms. Sweeney said such students can be taught to read in a multisensory program that includes books-on-tape. "We don't want a watered-down curriculum," she said.

A key issue, says Linda Spector, director of special education at Ann Arbor Academy in Ann Arbor, Mich., is that many kids with reading issues are at a high conceptual level. Ms. Spector would welcome the new series from Sterling Publishing into the school's library as a resource for students who want to read "Tom Sawyer" but can't. However, in the classroom she is emphasizing original literature by using short stories. "We're getting away from the adaptations and want the beautiful, original language," she says.

Misspelling

From an article in today's New York Times:

Simon Curtis is tall and affable, with a shy inwardness befitting a teenagehood spent alone in the bedroom drawing comics and pouring over heavy metal and punk records.

That should be poring. To pore over something is to study it carefully. One might pore over a piece one has written to check for homonym errors.

You can read the article by clicking here. [Use mediajunkie as your name and password.]

Zuppa time

From the package of Alessi's Lenticchie (lentil soup) that my wife is reading in the kitchen:

There is a saying about soups in Southern Italy that states, "Sette cose fa la zuppa," which translates to "Soup does seven things. It relieves your hunger, quenches your thirst, fills your stomach, cleans your teeth, makes you sleep, helps you digest and colors your cheeks."

She's also baking bread. Thanks, Elaine.

The class of 1940

From an article in the New York Times on members of the class of 1940 from James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York, who now gather every two months for dinner:

They were also lucky with their teachers, said Dorothy Fisch Thomashower, the editor of the yearbook, The Log, who went on to become a biographer and book indexer. The Depression, she said, meant that scholars who might have chosen a professorial track ended up teaching in high school.

Every Thursday evening, Mrs. Touster, an English teacher (no one could remember her first name), invited students to her home in the neighborhood, now known as Midwood, for poetry readings or to listen to her collection of classical 78's. "We were 17-year-old kids and we assumed this above-it-all attitude," said Bernice Tansman Levine. "One would sprawl on the steps, another would lay prone in the living room, and she put on this magnificent music."

Because of her, said Mrs. Levine, who spent most of her working life as a state employment counselor, "I don't read Danielle Steel--I read Saul Bellow and Philip Roth."

You can read the article by clicking here.

[To read the Times, use mediajunkie as your name and password.]

"The Scourge of Arial"

From Mark Simonson's essay "The Scourge of Arial":

Arial is everywhere. If you don't know what it is, you don't use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft's influence in the world.

Arial's ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It's actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

You can read the essay by clicking here.