On December 8

On December 8, 1957, CBS aired The Sound of Jazz, whose highlight is Billie Holiday's performance of "Fine and Mellow." I'm happy to say that this performance can be found on YouTube. The version I've linked to below is the one with the best sound- and image-quality.

If you're not a jazz head, here is the sequence of soloists: Ben Webster (tenor), Lester Young (tenor), Vic Dickenson (trombone), Gerry Mulligan (baritone), Coleman Hawkins (tenor), and Roy Eldridge (trumpet). There's also a brief shot of Doc Cheatham playing a muted trumpet obbligato. The other musicians are Mal Waldron (piano), Danny Barker (guitar), Milt Hinton (bass), and Osie Johnson (drums).

Whoever supervised the camera work understood the irrepressible interest we have in looking (no, make that staring) at faces. Watch Ben Webster's quick nod at 1:31 (he seems to be saying "Mmm, that note tasted good"). Watch Holiday's face as she listens to Lester Young, the great friend with whom she'd had a falling out (he had named her "Lady Day" years earlier; she had named him "Pres"). And watch Gerry Mulligan's face as Coleman Hawkins solos.

On December 8, 1980, John Lennon was murdered. Paul Simon wrote of that December 8 (and of the December 24, 1954 death of singer Johnny Ace) in "The Late Great Johnny Ace":

On a cold December evening
I was walking through the Christmastide
When a stranger came up and asked me
If I'd heard John Lennon had died
And the two of us went to this bar
And we stayed to close the place
And every song we played was for
The late great Johnny Ace, yeah, yeah, yeah

And that's what I know about December 8.

Billie Holiday, "Fine and Mellow"
John Lennon (official website)
Johnny Ace (Wikipedia)

Ambrosia and the deathless ones

From Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day:

ambrosia (am-BROE-zhuhuh) noun

1. In classical mythology, the food of the gods.
2. Something very pleasing to taste or smell.
3. A dessert made of oranges and shredded coconut.

[From Latin, from Greek ambrotos, from a- (not) + mbrotos (mortal). Ultimately from the Indo-European root mer- (to rub away or to harm) that is also the source of morse, mordant, amaranth, morbid, mortal, mortgage, and nightmare.]

The Greek gods of course, subsisting on their not-mortal food, are athanatoi, deathless or, literally, not-dead.

I cannot hear the word ambrosia without remembering a weird bit of dialogue from the old television series Hazel. It's been stuck in my head since childhood, "Mister B." speaking to Hazel (his maid): "Hazel, your sweet potato pie is sheer ambrosia!" Pies made from potatoes? Ambrosia? Maids? I remember as a kid thinking that here was a world I would never be part of.

Hazel and Mister B., available on DVD (and still perhaps in re-runs somewhere), are now among the deathless ones themselves.

Robert Schneider sees things clearly

Professor Robert Schneider sees things clearly:

Podcasts of university courses are not "every student's dream"; they're totally bogus, a thin surrogate for real instruction, a fig leaf for disengagement, an excuse for lack of commitment from professors and students alike. People who believe in the transformative value of higher education will resist podcastification with a passion.

I hope that he's right.

Professor Schneider is writing in response to a student-journalist's commentary on said "dream." He quotes from her description:

Wake up for school, stumble over to the computer, and download the day's class lectures . . . then crawl back into bed -- iPod in one hand, notebook in the other.

This scene reminds me in some way of the picture of intellectual and emotional isolation near the end of The Waste Land:

We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

I remember being presented some years ago with the argument that a college course consisting of videotaped lectures was a good "alternative" for students, particularly students who did not seek much contact with professors. "Professor in a can," some of us were calling it (or was it "in a box"?). What would the person "administering" the class (who would not be the professor on tape) do? Give and grade exams two or three times a semester.

As I've written in a previous blog post (about wireless classrooms), technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. It's possible to be a professor in a can. It's possible to stay in bed and take notes on a voice coming to you through headphones. But there are better ways to teach and learn.

Follow the link for the rest of Schneider's passionate rebuttal of what he calls "dystopian nonsense."

The Attack of the Pod People (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Curiosity and its discontents

My son Ben just came in with some interesting news: he wants to write an article for the high-school page in our local newspaper comparing high-school life in 1956 and 2006. To write this piece, he proposes to study the 1956-57 yearbook (available in the school office).

His teacher told him that "No one would be interested" in reading such an article. He's going to write it anyway, and fight the power that be.

Go Ben!

Another word from the Greek

It's Merriam-Webster's word of the day:

symposium \sim-POH-zee-um\ noun
*1 : a social gathering at which there is free interchange of ideas
2 a : a formal meeting at which several specialists deliver short addresses on a topic or on related topics b : a collection of opinions on a subject; especially : one published by a periodical
3 : discussion

Example sentence: The symposium gave Eduardo and other writers the chance to listen to and share new ideas about literature.

Did you know? It was drinking more than thinking that drew people to the original symposia and that gave us the word "symposium." The ancient Greeks would often follow a banquet with a drinking party they called a "symposion." That name came from "sympinein," a verb that combines "pinein," meaning "to drink," with the prefix "syn-," meaning "together." Originally, English speakers only used "symposium" to refer to such an ancient Greek party, but in the 18th century British gentlemen's clubs started using the word for gatherings in which intellectual conversation was fueled by drinking. By the 19th century, "symposium" had gained the more sober sense we know today, describing meetings in which the focus is more on the exchange of ideas and less on imbibing.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

I can remember as a (naïve) college freshman being baffled by the drinking in Plato's Symposium. This was philosophy? Huh?

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

"Analog geezer"

From the New York Times:

Variety recently published an obituary for the VHS format: "VHS, 30, dies of loneliness." If there's a format heaven, you'd expect VHS to be joining audiocassettes there. At age 42, cassettes predate VHS and have been pummeled by CDs and digital downloads.

But the cassette just won't seem to die.

The article goes on to explain why.

The Analog Geezer That Keeps Working (New York Times)

And a related link, with photographs showing "the amazing beauty and (sometimes) weirdness found in the designs of the common audio tape cassette":

tapedeck.org

Readers and writers

L. Lee Lowe went exploring in the NCSA glossary and came back with treasures: ghost icon, passive gateway, shadow widget.

Most interesting of all, Lee says, is the explanation of readers and writers. See what she found by following the link.

Ghost icon and the love of dictionaries (from lowebrow)

Britney Spears and Sophocles

Christie's auction house explains:

A page taken from Britney Spears' junior high school notebook containing her handwritten review of Rex Warner's translation of Sophocles' story Antigone, written in black ballpoint pen on either side of the page, Britney's review annotated by her teacher with corrections to her spelling and comments including Nice cover Organized Watch your spelling and Write more neatly and her grade: 88; and a corresponding piece of yellow card decorated with the book's title Antigone in black felt pen -- 12x9in. (30.5x20.8cm.)

This item was offered in an on-line auction to raise money for the Britney Spears Foundation.

I especially like "He get's scared to he lets her go. NO" "To where" is the horrendous idiom the writer is in search of. Note though that in addition to letting the apostrophe go, the teacher has no offered no suggestion as to how one might reconstruct this sentence. Perhaps the teacher was so tired of grading to where they just couldn't bother. (I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.)

And was it Britney or her teacher who appears to have added Rex Warner's name (not Sophocles') at the top? The ink seems to match the teacher's corrections, and the capital R looks pretty old-fashioned. We'll just have to wonder: the bidding is closed.

Britney Spears' Antigone (Christie's, via Gawker)

Tables for studying

Just in time for final examinations: Anastasia at Lawsagna took the idea of granularity and created tables with which students can plan out their studying by subject and by time available. These tables are quite nifty if you feel at home doing such planning on the computer. You can download the Excel file by following the link to her post.

Strategies and tools to plan your exam preparation (Lawsagna)

Hello, Boing Boing readers

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(If you're wondering what this post is about, I've been Boing Boinged.)