“[D]ark, wordy, academic deaths”

Buddy Glass, in a letter to brother Zooey:

On especially black days I sometimes tell myself that if I’d loaded up with degrees when I was able, I might not now be teaching anything quite so collegiate and hopeless as Advanced Writing 24-A. But that’s probably bunk. The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961)

(It’s been years and years since I last looked at this book. And years.)

Clark Terry at the Grammys

Clark and Gwen Terry were visible for a few seconds at the Grammy Awards last night. Those seconds are at YouTube, at least for a little while. Do not be baffled by the clip’s title: Quentin Tarantino announces Clark’s Lifetime Achievement Award right before introducing Drake, Eminem, and Lil Wayne.

My characterization of last night’s telecast, or what I saw of it: Busby Berkeley meets Brave New World. In other words, music as hyper-technologized spectacle. I turned on the radio afterward to have some music while doing the dishes and heard Angela Hewitt’s recording of François Couperin’s Les langueurs tendres. It was the perfect Grammy antidote.

A related post
Clark Terry’s Lifetime Achievement Award

OS X hidden gems

“Have you ever noticed that little dark circle that appears within the close button of a document window in OS X when you have unsaved changes? Yeah, me neither.”

(via Minimal Mac)

Van Dyke Parks in Portland

Van Dyke Parks plays Portland, Oregon, February 10, 2010. Says he, “I’ve decided to go out and flog a lifetime of unpromoted song.”

Eve Shea remembers J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger, in a letter to Eve Shea:

I’m cheerless at weddings, but almost entirely, wholly, and I’m convinced it’s not a bad idea at all to spare people I like the sight of me standing around, mostly mute, with a drink I don’t want in my hand.

Shea met Salinger in 1977, when she was thirteen. They were very occasional correspondents for fourteen years. Read more:

Goodbye Uncle Jerry (The Globe and Mail)

Clark Terry’s Lifetime Achievement Award

Trumpeter and flugelhornist Clark Terry is one of seven musicians receiving Lifetime Achievement Awards today from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. The other honorees: Leonard Cohen, Bobby Darin, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Michael Jackson, Loretta Lynn, and André Previn.

I was lucky to do a radio interview with Clark Terry some years ago, when I was putting in two hours a week playing jazz at my university’s FM station. (The station then aired four hours of classical music and five hours of jazz a day, with bluegrass, blues, hip-hop, indie rock, and reggae in the evenings. Now the station plays “hits.”) Clark was on campus to lead a workshop and perform, and had agreed to come over to the station in the afternoon for an interview. He and I talked for an hour on the air. I consider that hour one the most memorable experiences in my life: the opportunity to talk not only with a great musician but with a great Ellingtonian. It was a really good interview. The interviewer, as you might imagine, had done his homework.

The Grammy Awards air tomorrow night on CBS, 8:00 Eastern Time. I hope that the Lifetime Achievement awardees get more than just a perfunctory roll call. We’ll see.

Related reading
Clark Terry’s website
NARAS press release

5 sentences about life on the moon

The Google search 5 sentences about life on the moon brought someone to my post on five sentences from Bleak House. Sorry, wrong orb. But I’ll bite:

Moon: life on the, five sentences about

(The moon. MR. and MRS. JOHNNY BURKE sit at a table. They wear evening clothes. A SERVING MAN stands to one side.)

MR. BURKE
    Moon life becomes you. It goes with your hair.
    You certainly know the right thing to wear.

MRS. BURKE
    Actually, I’m freezing.

SERVING MAN
    Would anyone care for more cheese?

[The first three sentences, more or less, are borrowed from the 1942 song “Moonlight Becomes You,” words by Johnny Burke, music by Jimmy Van Heusen.]

Related posts
Five sentences about clothes
Five sentences for smoking
Five sentences on the ship

Lawn, goodbye (Hi and Lois)

There seems to be a new person working the line at Hi-Lo Amalgamated. Interstice problems — the changing door, the changing greenery, the disappearing picture — are the same old same old. What’s new: the Flagstons’ front door now opens onto the sidewalk. Lawn, goodbye, for now.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

J.D. Salinger (1919–2010)

J.D. Salinger has died.

Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

The New York Times reports that there will be no service.

A P.S. 131 class picture, 1966–1967

[Click for a larger view.]

The above photograph shows Mrs. Marcia Schorr’s fifth-grade class, P.S. 131, Boro Park, Brooklyn, New York, 1966–1967. Not a cross tie in the crowd.

I remember Mrs. Schorr as very capable, very calm. The envelope that holds my fifth-grade report card holds a note from her to my dad (on a note-card, in an envelope, of course), thanking him for a card he had made for her. Mrs. Schorr was wishing us well on leaving the city for New Jersey: “Brooklyn will be losing a fine family!” What a gracious and generous thing to say.

As a kid, I liked the effect that the horrible lighting had on the boys in the top row: it gave them long hair. Looking at this photograph now, I wonder whether Albert’s shirt pocket (third row, middle) was holding what we called an I.D. wallet. Such wallets were accessories in our work as school-aged secret agents in The Black Cat Club. (Secret agents always carry I.D., right?) And I now remember something I haven’t thought of in years: a lunch hour during which Donald (top row, left) and I stood on safety patrol and I told him what menstruation was. My mom and dad believed in reality-based parenting — no birds, no bees, no storks.

That concludes class pictures at Orange Crate Art. In the suburbs of New Jersey, all school pictures were of individual students. So the class picture was a set of separate little rectangles on a white background, young suburbanites each with her or his own little bit of property.

[I’m uneasy about identifying fellow fifth-graders by last name without permission, so I haven’t. These photographs have faded and remain so here, as unimproved scans. I’m the kid in the second row, left, looking rather short.]

More from the P.S. 131 collection
1962–1963 1963–1964 1964–1965 1965–1966