In praise of shyness

“At the very least, if you’re shy, you’re never bored.”

James Parker, Let Us Now Praise Shyness (Boston Globe)

Rachel Maddow makes cocktails

“It’s the cartoon liquor-pouring noise!” Look and learn:

Rachel Maddow makes cocktails, talks about Angostura Bitters (MSNBC)

Our household seems to have survived the Angostura shortage in happy oblivion. We’ve been working on the same bottle for years, making Old Fashioneds.

Greenwich Village and coffee house

The dog walker is carrying a pencil, I think.



As Tom Lehrer put it, “We are the Folk Song Army,” &c.

Untitled illustrations by Ruby Davidson, from Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964). Captions mine.

Also from Harold Hart’s Guide
Chock full o’Nuts
Mayflower Coffee Shop(pe)
Minetta Tavern, Monkey Bar
Record stores
Schrafft’s

Mayflower Coffee Shop(pe)

I found a wonderful book at a library sale yesterday: Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964): “Over 2,200 personally investigated reports. Restaurants, Hotels, Nightclubs, Museums, Cocktail Lounges, Sports, Shopping, Transportation, Art Galleries, Tours, etc.”

With Hart in hand, I thought of lines from Frank O’Hara’s poem “Music” (Lunch Poems, 1964):

If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian
pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the
    Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into
    Bergdorf’s

This bit of urban surrealism comes into focus (still surreal) when one knows a little of Manhattan. “The Equestrian” is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s statue of William Tecumseh Sherman, found in Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza (at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue). The “angel” is the allegorical gal leading Sherman on his way. Bergdorf Goodman is to be found — in the words of the company website — at “the crossroads of fashion,” Fifth Avenue and 58th Street. All that, I know. As for the Mayflower Shoppe:



Thank you, Mr. Hart.

The Mayflower stood at 777 Fifth Avenue. The Apple Store now stands at 767, next to an empty corner. More from Hart’s Guide to come.

More on the Mayflower
The Mayflower motto (“The Optimist’s Creed”)
A menu page (Alas, no food)

Also from Harold Hart’s Guide
Chock full o’Nuts
Greenwich Village and coffee house
Minetta Tavern, Monkey Bar
Record stores
Schrafft’s

Ray LaHood and bicycles

Good news:

[Transportation Secretary Ray] LaHood says the government is going to give bicycling — and walking, too — the same importance as automobiles in transportation planning and the selection of projects for federal money. The former Republican congressman quietly announced the “sea change” in transportation policy last month. . . .

The new policy is an extension of the Obama administration’s livability initiative, which regards the creation of alternatives to driving — buses, streetcars, trolleys and trains, as well as biking and walking — as central to solving the nation’s transportation woes.

Imagine: policies that emphasize alternatives to the car. Good on the Obama administration and Ray LaHood. But I can hear it already: the government wants to take away your vehicles. Communism! Socialism! Bicycles!

News grammar

“Frequent with random shuffling or elimination conjunctions and prepositions of”: Rules Grammar Change.

*

Are different is grammar.

Gertrude Stein, How to Write (1931)

“Love, Irving Sappho”

In childhood, the Glass children left soap-written messages for one another on the medicine-cabinet mirror. In adulthood, they still do. In 1942, sister Boo Boo (an ensign in the Waves) leaves a message for brother Seymour on the occasion of his wedding. Her handwriting is “almost indecipherably minute”:

Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everybody on this block.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963)

Google Books has a 1920 translation of Irving Sappho’s poem that matches the Glass version (save for a hyphenated roof-beam and the exclamatory Hymenaeus).

Bill Madison’s Proust Census

“If you were not yourself, how many people would you be on April 1, 2010?” Bill Madison presents the Proust Census.

Special theory of relativity

Forty is the new thirty. Sixty is the new forty. Eighty is the new sixty. Ninety is the new eighty.

Also, ninety-two is the new eighty-three. Ninety-six is the new ninety. Ninety-seven is the new ninety-two.

A hundred is still a hundred.

Easy-listening “Heroes and Villains”

An easy-listening instrumental version of “Heroes and Villains” (Brian Wilson–Van Dyke Parks). Dance, Margarita.