"Ice and Snow Blues"

I'm gonna build me a castle, out of the ice and snow
I'm gonna build me a castle, out of the ice and snow
So I can freeze these barefooted women 'way from
     around my door

That's the first chorus of Clifford Gibson's "Ice and Snow Blues," recorded in New York City on November 26, 1929. This lyric is one of the most striking blues conceits I know, a surreal image of the singer-guitarist in a frozen Xanadu. Barefooted women, keep out!

As I learned by chance this afternoon, the ice-and-snow conceit did not originate with Gibson. Pearl Dickson's "Twelve Pound Daddy" (recorded in Memphis, December 12, 1927) has it too. It happens that I have this song on Frank Stokes' Dream: The Memphis Blues, a compilation LP that I bought as a young blues fan, 35-or-so years ago:

I'm gonna build me a castle, out of ice and snow
Lordy, out of ice and snow
So when my blues come around, I can freeze them
     from my door

I wonder whether the weather in November 1929 inspired Clifford Gibson to make ice and snow the starting point for a new song. On Monday, November 25, 1929, the New York Times had an item with the charming title "Mercury to Rise Today: Bears Rake Leaves Into Den as Snow Falls in Palisades Park." The paper noted a Saturday "cold snap that sent New York into its heavy overcoats and covered much of the remainder of the country with snow and frost." Was Gibson making his way from St. Louis to New York during that cold snap? Did he get off the train in New York with this unusual blues conceit in mind? Did a recording engineer suggest doing a song about the weather?

Today's weather brought Clifford Gibson's song into my mind, as I'm typing in a house that's covered in ice and snow. There are no barefooted women outside though -- or inside either. My wife Elaine is here, and she's wearing socks. Happy Valentine's Day, Elaine!


[Above, a tree in the front yard.]

Links

Clifford Gibson (1901-1963) was a brilliant guitarist. His 1929-1931 recordings are available on one CD: Complete Recorded Works, 1929-1931. (Included: A killer duet with Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman.)

Pearl Dickson's "Twelve Pound Daddy" can (still) be found on Frank Stokes' Dream: The Memphis Blues, 1927-1931 (Yazoo Records).

It was a page from Michael Gray's The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia that alerted me to the Pearl Dickson connection: Background on "Ice and Snow Blues" (Amazon Online Reader, Amazon account required).

Julia Child and Rachael Ray

My daughter, whose does a great Rachael Ray imitation, will like this commentary, by chef Anthony Bourdain:

Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better -- teach us -- and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. "You're doing just fine. You don't even have to chop an onion -- you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing . . . Just sit there. Have another Triscuit . . . Sleep . . . sleep. . . ."

From a longer commentary on Food Network personalities:

Nobody Asked Me But (ruhlman.com, via kottke.org)

September 6, 2011: That link is gone, but the commentary lives on at the Internet Archive.

Levenger Pocket Briefcase, revised

In the mail this week, the latest Levenger catalogue, offering three styles of the Pocket Briefcase®. The Pocket Briefcase is a beautiful object, but an expensive one (the standard model sells for $38). A simple modification brings much of its utility to all. Behold the Pocket Briefcase revised:

Before

A portable, pocket-sized leather writing pad and a supply of 3 x 5 cards can become your indispensable tools for on-the-go thinking.

After

   binder clip
A^portable, pocket-sized leather writing pad and a supply of 3 x 5 cards can become your indispensable tools for on-the-go thinking.

Yes, the Pocket Briefcase revised is the good old Hipster PDA.

Hipster PDA (43 Folders)
Levenger Shirt Pocket Briefcase

How to get up early

Lifehack has a very useful post today on how to get up early -- to be specific, at 5:00 a.m.

[Note to self: The tips offered could also help with getting up at 6:10 a.m.]

How to start your day at 5:00 a.m. (Lifehack.org)

Related post
How to be a morning person

"It is snowing."

A prose-poem from Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960):

Souffle

Il neige sur mon toit et sur les arbres. Le mur et le jardin sont blancs, le sentier noir et la maison s'est écroulée sans bruit. Il neige.

*

Breath

It is snowing on my roof and on the trees. The wall and the garden are white, the path black, and the house has given way without a sound. It is snowing.

Reverdy's poems are often extremely difficult to translate. This one isn't. The only word that poses difficulty (for me) is écrouler. My little paperback French-English dictionary gives "to collapse," "to crumble," "to flop (as in a chair)." My ancient Harrap's Shorter is more helpful; it gives "to collapse, fall in, give way, tumble down." I like the idea of a house giving way to the snow. What about bruit? Noise seems too noisy here. For sans bruit, Harrap's gives "noiselessly, quietly." An adverb in this poem though would be too decorative. "Without a sound" goes better with the stillness of the scene. ("Without a sound," oddly enough, is Babel Fish's suggestion for sans bruit.)

I once brought "Souffle" into a grade-school class that I visited each month to share some poetry. I read the poem a couple of times and asked the children what sort of feeling they thought the poet had about the snow. I thought I would hear something about mystery and silence and stillness and whiteness. No; the mood of the poem, they said, was excitement. Why? Because Pierre can go out and play in the snow! It made me happy that those children thought of a poet as someone just like them.

[Note: Mary Ann Caws' bilingual edition of Selected Poems offers the same translation of "Souffle." But the above translation is mine. I didn't peek.]

"Baby, It's Cold Outside"

It is. It's 11°F outside (3°F with the windchill). Here are four versions of Frank Loesser's song, via YouTube:

June Carter Cash and Homer and Jethro
Rock Hudson and Mae West
Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews
Fred MacMurray, Ann Miller, and Dinah Shore

The recording of the song can be found on Ray Charles and Betty Carter (1961).

"Baby, It's Cold Outside" (Wikipedia)

Beware of the saurus¹

Reading an essay from a college freshman many years ago, I came across a sentence that baffled me — it referred to "ingesting an orange." I crossed out "ingest," wrote "eat," and wondered why anyone would've written otherwise. At the time, it didn't occur to me that my student had very likely started with "eat," only to cross it out and substitute a word that seemed somehow better — lofty, less plain, more imposing.

Since then I've taught many students who seek to improve their writing by using "better" words. Their revision strategies focus on replacing plain words with big, shiny ones. Such students usually rely on a thesaurus, now more available to a writer than ever before as a tool in many word-processing programs.

But dressing up a piece of prose with thesaurus-words tends not to work well. Here's why: a thesaurus suggests words without explaining nuances of meaning and levels of diction. So if you choose substitute-words from a thesaurus, it's likely that your writing will look as though you've done just that. The thesaurus-words are likely to look odd and awkward, or as a writer relying on Microsoft Word’s thesaurus might put it, "extraordinary and uncoordinated." When I see that sort of strange diction in a student's writing and ask whether a thesaurus is involved, the answer, always, is yes.

A thesaurus might be a helpful tool to jog a writer's memory by calling up a familiar word that's just out of reach. But to expand the possibilities of a writer's vocabulary, a collegiate dictionary is a much better choice, offering explanations of the differences in meaning and use among closely related words. Here's just one example: Merriam-Webster’s treatment of synonyms for awkward.

What student-writers need to realize is that it's not ornate vocabulary or word-substitution that makes good writing. Clarity, concision, and organization are far more important in engaging and persuading a reader to find merit in what you're saying. If you're tempted to use the thesaurus the next time you're working on an essay, consider what is about to happen to this sentence:

If you're lured to utilize the thesaurus on the subsequent occasion you're toiling on a treatise, mull over what just transpired to this stretch.

¹ Not the dog.

Whitney Balliett (1926-2007)

The jazz critic Whitney Balliett died yesterday. His style, like any distinctive style, is easily parodied, but there is no better writer to convey the sound of jazz. Here is one sample, from a long piece on Charlie Parker:

Parker had a unique tone; no other saxophonist has achieved as human a sound. It could be edgy, and even sharp. (He used the hardest and most technically difficult of reeds.) It could be soft and buzzing. Unlike most saxophonists of his time, who took their cue from Coleman Hawkins, he used almost no vibrato; when he did, it was only a flutter, a murmur. The blues lived in every room in his style, and he was one of the most striking and affecting blues improvisers we have had. His slow blues had a preaching, admonitory quality. He would begin a solo with a purposely stuttering four-or-five note announcement, pause for effect, repeat the phrase, bending its last note into silence, and then turn the phrase around backward and abruptly slip sidewise into double time, zigzag up the scale, circle around quickly at the top, and plummet down, the notes falling somewhere between silence and sound. (Parker was a master of dynamics and of the dramatic use of silence.) Another pause, and he would begin his second chorus with a dreaming, three-note figure, each of the notes running into the next but each held in prolonged, hymnlike fashion. Taken from an unexpected part of the chord, they would slip out in slow motion. He would shatter this brief spell by inserting two or three short arpeggios, disconnected and broken off, then he would float into a backpedaling half-time and shoot into another climbing-and-falling double-time run, in which he would dart in and out of nearby keys. He would pause, then close the chorus with an amen figure resembling his opening announcement.

From New York Notes: A Journal of Jazz in the Seventies (New York: Da Capo,1977)

Whitney Balliett, New Yorker Jazz Critic, Dies at 80 (New York Times)

Overheard

"I mean, come on -- you have a dozen women. Make THEM do it!"

Previous "Overheard" posts

Bookstore music

I have little tolerance for what I call "bookstore music" -- the tepid, unobtrusive stuff one hears when browsing in Borders. And nothing seems to say "bookstore music" more plainly than "Norah Jones." Jones is, in truth, a distinctive singer (her "Don't Miss You at All," a lyrical setting of Duke Ellington's "Melancholia," is one of the most moving recordings I've ever heard). But she's being marketed as background music. Here, sentence by sentence, is Borders' pitch for Jones' new CD:

With its laid-back beauty, sly musicianship, and honeyed singing

"Sly"? "Honeyed"? Those adjectives grate. Given the sexy overtones in this opening phrase, I wonder whether "its" was originally "her."

Norah Jones' latest album is as comforting as a summer breeze on a winter day.

It's odd to refer to an "album's" singing, which strengthens my suspicion about "its" and "her." And in light of global warming, I'd think twice about calling that breeze "comforting."

On Not Too Late, Jones shares in the writing of each track

One doesn't write tracks; one writes songs (or fugues, sonatas, symphonies, and so on).

for a personal recording

I'm not sure what defines a "personal recording," but given the ability of great singers (Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra) to make songs their own, composer credit is hardly necessary for a "personal recording."

that indulges her honky-tonk side.

"Honky-tonk" startles a bit: suddenly I smell cigarette smoke in the summer breeze, a breeze that is now even less comforting than it was when it was reminding me of global warming.

It's a lovely set

"Lovely," on the heels of "honky-tonk"? Ah, what lovely honky-tonk! This CD promises to be all things to all people.

that sounds perfect whether you're enjoying a dinner party or the Sunday paper.

Yes, middle-aged listener, you there with the newspaper spread all over the living room, this CD's for you. You want music that's comforting, but you too have a honky-tonk side waiting to be indulged. And yes, it's the 21st century, in which music is mere background to accompany other, more important endeavors, like sipping a latte, or doing the crossword puzzle, or browsing in a bookstore.

Would this CD still sound "perfect" if one were just listening to it, and not practicing continuous partial attention?