JANUARY (WPA Art Project)

[Poster from the Illinois WPA Art Project, artist unknown. Stamped on the back: January 8, 1941. Via the Library of Congress online exhibit By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943.]

Happy New Year, and good reading to all.

I'm reading Dickens, Bleak House. You?

"Auld Lang Syne"

From 1964, the Beach Boys, channeling the Four Freshmen:

"Auld Lang Syne" (YouTube)

Goodbye, year.

Chocolate, wine, tea

Hail flavonoids:

According to Oxford researchers working with colleagues in Norway, chocolate, wine and tea enhance cognitive performance.

The team from Oxford's Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Norway examined the relation between cognitive performance and the intake of three common foodstuffs that contain flavonoids (chocolate, wine, and tea) in 2,031 older people (aged between 70 and 74).

Participants filled in information about their habitual food intake and underwent a battery of cognitive tests. Those who consumed chocolate, wine, or tea had significantly better mean test scores and lower prevalence of poor cognitive performance than those who did not. The team reported their findings in the Journal of Nutrition.

Chocolate, Wine And Tea Improve Brain Performance (Science Daily, via Lifehacker)

The article goes on to caution of course that it's moderate alcohol consumption that's associated with improved cognitive function — the sort of cognitive function involved in noticing that "chocolate, wine, and tea" are out of alphabetical order or that there's something amusing about the series "Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Norway."

A fifth Jane Austen character speaks

Miss Crawford, you play the harp. Do you know whether the Misses Owen are, any of them, musical?

"That is the first question, you know," said Miss Crawford, trying to appear gay and unconcerned, "which every woman who plays herself is sure to ask about another. But it is very foolish to ask questions about any young ladies — about any three sisters just grown up; for one knows, without being told, exactly what they are — all very accomplished and pleasing, and one very pretty. There is a beauty in every family. — It is a regular thing. Two play on the piano-forte, and one on the harp — and all sing — or would sing if they were taught — or sing all the better for not being taught — or something like it."

From Mansfield Park (1814)

Having come to the end of the novel, I realize that the amusing bits of dialogue I've posted are likely to mislead. Though a comedy ("happy ending"), Mansfield Park is a dark novel, encompassing despair, greed, infidelity, isolation, poverty, and (at a great distance) slavery. Troubling too is the novel's emphasis, in its strange final chapter, on contingency: while giving the reader the anticipated ending, the narrator also points out that nothing that has happened had to have happened — the characters' lives might have been worked out in other, equally satisfactory ways.

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The young people wanted to put on a play, Lovers' Vows. Sir Thomas came home and put an end to those plans. But Mr Crawford will never forget:

"It is as a dream, a pleasant dream!" he exclaimed, breaking forth again after a few minutes musing. "I shall always look back on our theatricals with exquisite pleasure. There was such an interest, such an animation, such a spirit diffused! Every body felt it. We were all alive. There was employment, hope, solicitude, bustle, for every hour of the day. Always some little objection, some little doubt, some little anxiety to be got over. I never was happier."

From Mansfield Park (1814)

And thinks Fanny Price, re: Mr Crawford, "'Oh! — what a corrupted mind!'"

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Sold!

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is planning to appoint former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's Senate seat:

The action comes despite warnings by Democratic Senate leaders that they would not seat anyone appointed by the disgraced governor[,] who faces criminal charges of trying to sell the post, sources familiar with the decision said.

Shortly after Obama's Nov. 4 victory, Burris made known his interest in an appointment to the Senate but was never seriously considered, according to Blagojevich insiders. But in the days following Blagojevich's arrest, and despite questions over the taint of a Senate appointment, Burris stepped up his efforts to win the governor's support.

I've added the comma and emphasis. I'll also add —

[here it is]

— a moment of baffled silence. After the arrest, after the disclosure of the content of Blagojevich's telephone conversations, Burris pursued the Senate appointment with greater fervor! I would like to doubt that he had much competition.

The Trib cites Burris as acknowledging that he has lost many Democratic primary elections but has "never lost to a Republican." If he is seated, I suspect that that loss will come in 2010.

Freddie Hubbard (1938-2008)

Sad news from the Associated Press:

Freddie Hubbard, the Grammy-winning jazz musician whose style influenced a generation of trumpet players and who collaborated with such greats as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, died Monday, a month after suffering a heart attack. He was 70.

Here, via YouTube, is a sample of Freddie Hubbard's musicianship, a performance of "Body and Soul," with McCoy Tyner (piano), Avery Sharp (bass), and Louis Hayes (drums). Keep listening: it's "Body and Soul," for real.

T. MONK'S ADVICE (1960)

[Click for a larger view.]

These scans of aphorisms and precepts attributed to Thelonious Monk, now appearing online, are said to be from a notebook belonging to soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. I can find no explanation as to where these scans originated or when the pages themselves were written. (I latched on via a Google Alert.)

Lacy, a longtime interpreter of Monk's music, played with Monk for four months in 1960, and several of these texts appear, with slight alterations, in Lacy's foreword to Thomas Fitterling's Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music, trans. Robert Dobbin (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 1997). If these scans are the work of someone amusing himself at the expense of Monk fans, we can trust at least that the following aphorisms and precepts, recorded in Lacy's foreword, come from the source:

Thelonious would not tell me what to play, but he would stop me if I got carried away: "Don't play all that bullshit, play the melody! Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head, or play off the rhythm of the melody, never mind the so-called chord changes." Also, "Don't pick up from me, I'm accompanying you!" Also: "Make the drummer sound good!" These tips are among the most valuable things anyone has ever told me.

Some of T.'s other bits of wisdom:

"The inside of the tune [the bridge] is what makes the outside sound good."

"A genius is the one who is most like himself."

"It's always night, otherwise you wouldn't need the light!"

"Whatever you think can't be done, someone will come along and do it."

"Monk = know = 'Always Know' (where you are)."

"When you're swinging, swing some more!"

"You've got to know the importance of discrimination, also the value of what you don't play, the use of space, and letting music go by, only picking out certain parts."

"A note can be as big as a mountain, or small as a pin. It only depends on a musician's imagination."

If I learn anything more about these scans, I'll post it here.

*

March 15, 2024: Mick Wright informs me that in Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New York: Free Press, 2009), Robin D.G. Kelley suggests in an endnote (page 531) that the document may be “a poor attempt at a forgery” or something that Lacy himself wrote long after 1960. Neither Mick nor I pretend to understand why someone would forge a document and pass it off as written by Steve Lacy. At any rate, this document’s provenance remains a mystery.

Jack Cella on decent bookstores

Today's Chicago Tribune has a column by Julia Keller on the Seminary Co-op Bookstores. My favorite bit, from the Sem Co-op's general manager Jack Cella:

"If you're in a decent bookstore, you can look at any shelf and realize how little you know."

Domestic comedy

"You like nice in that getup."

"Getup?"

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