Herb Ellis (1921–2010)

A fine guitarist has died. I will be listening to the Oscar Peterson Trio in my off hours today.

The New York Times obituary links to a great performance by Peterson, Ellis, and Ray Brown, “A Gal in Calico.”

Legends of Jazz Photography

Legends of Jazz Photography: William Claxton, William Gottlieb, and Herman Leonard, an exhibition at the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles. Dig Herman Leonard’s Lester Young still life.

Welcome, 500,000th visitor

StatCounter just recorded the 500,000th visitor to Orange Crate Art. Welcome, 500,000th visitor!

For big boys and girls, half a million visitors are all in a day’s work, or two. Not so here. Half a million visitors are a big deal.

I’m pretty certain that Visitor No. 500,000 is a friend who lives in ______, Illinois. She browses with Firefox in Windows XP. Sara, is that you? Your prizes are on their way.

Visitor No. 499,999 wondered about the truth of this statement: students can greet a professor by saying what’s up.

Uh, no. Sara would tell you that too.

I’m grateful to Visitor No. 499,999 (who may have received some serious edification by reading How to e-mail a professor). And I’m grateful to anyone who reads here. And if, reader, you’re reading the feed, in Google Reader or elsewhere, I’m grateful to you too. Stop by sometime and say hello. (Hello!)

Obama revisions

I spent some time last night looking closely at the White House photograph of a draft page of President Barack Obama’s September 9, 2009 remarks to a joint session of Congress. The subject was health care.

From the first paragraph, original, re: Ted Kennedy:

But those who knew him and worked with him here — people of both parties — know the truth. It was the experience of having two children stricken with cancer; the sheer terror and helplessness that any parent feels when a child is sick; and his ability to imagine what it must be like for those without insurance . . . .

From the first paragraph, revised:

But those of us who knew Teddy and worked with him here — people of both parties — know the truth was more complicated than that. It was the experience of having two children stricken with cancer. He never forgot the sheer terror and helplessness that any parent feels when a child is sick; and he was able to imagine what it must be like for those without insurance . . . .

The first sentence now includes its speaker — “of us” — and is made more intimate — “Teddy.” The thinking becomes more complex: the truth is not a simple or single thing. The sentences that follow make their subject tireless and empathetic: “he never forgot”; “he was able to imagine.” Behold the power of verbs.

From the second paragraph, original:

That large-heartedness — that compassion — is not a partisan feeling.

From the second paragraph, revised:

That large-heartedness — that concern and regard for the plight of others — is not a partisan feeling.

I’m tempted to prefer the concision of “compassion,” but it makes sense that something large should follow “large-heartedness.” And what sounds greater to your ears? Compassion, or concern and regard for the plight of others? The revision also creates an attractive series of anapests (xx/): that conCERN, and reGARD, for the PLIGHT.

If you look at the photograph, you might be surprised by what happens as this paragraph continues: the sentences about Stanley Ann Dunham’s cancer and Sasha Obama’s meningitis are crossed out, as are lengthy handwritten additions to those sentences. Removing those brief accounts makes for a stronger tie between the statement about non-partisan feeling and the sentences that now follow.

Third paragraph, original:

For that too is part of the character of this country — our ability to stand in other people’s shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand and that hard work and responsibility to family and community and country should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play that sometimes only a government can ensure.

Third paragraph, revised:

For that too is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people’s shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play — and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.

In the first sentence, the point that large-heartedness is neither Democratic nor Republican is sharper — large-heartedness is now American. And the sentence now ends with its most important noun, “character.” It’s probably only coincidence that the sentence now recalls the title of D.W. Brogan’s The American Character (1944).

The remainder of this paragraph, pre-revision, already sounds like Obama in its parallelism. But it’s a mighty long sentence to trek through. The revision breaks the sentence into more graspable (and thus more moving) elements. The parallelism becomes rousing, built not merely from “that” but from a series of nouns: “a recognition that,” “a belief that,” “an acknowledgement that.” Notice “in this country”: this is the way we do things. Notice too the urgency added to the final sentence, twice revised: an acknowledgment not that government “can help deliver on that promise” but that “sometimes government has to step in” to do so.

This draft page shows what anyone who writes and works at it comes to figure out, again and again: that everything is subject to revision, and that some things must be cut for the sake of the whole. I can imagine the President realizing at some point that the account of his family’s medical woes would not serve his purpose — that “it,” as they say, was not about him.

The speech as delivered differs of course from this revised draft:

Remarks by the President to a Joint Session of Congress
on Health Care (whitehouse.gov)

[Update, March 30, 2010: I missed the added “in this country,” third paragraph, and have revised accordingly.]

What good writing looks like

You can see it in this photograph.

A related post
What Good Writing Can Accomplish (Musical Assumptions)

How to improve writing (no. 27)

The Blogger template’s sidebar phrasing — “View my complete profile” — has long bugged me. Why my? Why complete? Even Geoffrey Pullum might concede that Strunk and White’s “Omit needless words” makes sense here.

Improving this bit of writing involves editing the Blogger template: go to the Dashboard, click Layout, click Edit HTML, and check Expand Widget Templates. Now search for

It appears only once. Replace it — all of it, including “<” and “>” — with whatever words you like, like so:

Click Preview to make sure all’s well, and save.

I found this solution in a helpful post at Sam Regist’s WebBanshee.

[This post is no. 27 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Related reading
1 COMMENTS
All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)

Steve Wozniak on the iPad and college

In a February 15 post on the iPad and college students, I wrote:

Consider the price. For a family sending a daughter or son to college, the iPad is an attractive alternative to a low-end Windows laptop (and half the price of a MacBook). . . .

The market that the iPad is to conquer: college students. That’s my hunch. (Now let’s see if I’m right.)

I think I’m going to be right. If not, at least I’m in good company. Here’s Steve Wozniak in the April 5 issue of Newsweek:

The iPad could lower the cost of acquiring computers for students. I think it’s going to be huge in the education market. Think about students going off to college. They want an Apple product, but their parents don’t want to spend that much. Now they have the ideal thing. They can go to college and someone may have a whacked-out $6,000 laptop, but the guy with the iPad will get all the attention.

Read more:

Why Steve Wozniak Wants Two iPads (Newsweek)

Bill Withers and John Hammond

I’ve been following writer and record-producer Chris Albertson’s posts at Stomp Off in C on record-producer John Hammond. (There are now one, two, three, four, five of them.) Scanning recent issues of the New Yorker this morning, I noticed this passage in a Sasha Frere-Jones piece on Bill Withers and the documentary film Still Bill:

Though the movie captures Withers criticizing the CBS A. & R. man who suggested that he cover Elvis Presley‘s “In the Ghetto,” in the eighties, his fiercest riposte to the white “blaxperts” can be found in an interview filmed for the 2005 reissue of “Just As I Am.”

“You gonna tell me the history of the blues? I am the goddam blues. Look at me. Shit. I’m from West Virginia, I’m the first man in my family not to work in the coal mines, my mother scrubbed floors on her knees for a living, and you’re going to tell me about the goddam blues because you read some book written by John Hammond? Kiss my ass.”

“CBS A. & R. man”: I’m guessing that New Yorker scruples about fact-checking require that the name be absent. But the paragraph that follows certainly implies that “In the Ghetto” was John Hammond’s idea.

Read and watch
Bill Withers (official site)
Still Bill (movie site)

Facial hair in comics

Brian Steinberg is tracking Hi Flagston’s “recession beard.”

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Sue Shellenbarger declutters

Sue Shellenbarger tried three different approaches to decluttering:

After getting rid of 800 pounds of recycling and trash, hauling two SUV-loads of donations to Goodwill Industries, and dropping off 17 boxes of books at the public library, I am exhilarated by the newfound open space in my house, which seems bigger and more serene. . . . And I am more thoughtful about how I acquire, use and dispose of stuff.

Read more:

Testing Spring Cleaning Techniques (Wall Street Journal)

Maybe I don’t need an orange toothbrush after all.

No, wait. I do.