Pete Seeger sings of the BP oil spill

Pete Seeger sings a song that he wrote with Lorre Wyatt: “God’s Counting on Me, God’s Counting on You.” It may not be a great song, but it’s a good one for these times. The message — tikkun olam — makes sense in any language.

Lorre Wyatts don’t grow on trees, and it seems a reasonable assumption that Seeger’s co-composer is the man known in urban legend as the composer of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Thanks, Luanne and Jim, for news of this song.

A few Seeger posts
Happy birthday, Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger synchronicity
“Pete’s banjo head”
“Take It from Dr. King”

Proposition 8

Overturned!

A related post
The flag of equal marriage

On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

[“Rear view of jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong waving to a crowd of adoring fans as their applause rolls over him.” Photograph by John Loengard, 1965. Via the Life photo archive.]

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

A few Armstrong posts
Armstrong and Arlen, blues and weather
The day Louis Armstrong made noise
Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
“Self-Reliance” and jazz
Louis Armstrong, collagist
Louis Armstrong’s advice

Overheard

In a restaurant, one young woman talking very loudly to another:

“My turkey chili disincluded her. She said that I was telling her to make alternative plans.”

Related reading
All “Overheard” posts

Ernie Pyle in the Library of America

For Elaine in Arkansas (“the other Elaine”): Ernie Pyle is one of the writers whose work appears in the Library of America’s Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944. Pyle was born 110 years ago today.

(Via Pete Lit.)

“Creative Personality Checklist”

“Creative Personality Checklist,” by Olly Moss. Which pencil are you?

How to improve writing (no. 28)

Joe Manley passed along these sentences, lifted from a bottle of E&J Brandy. He finds them “pretentious” and “vacuous” and amusing:

One of the most distinctive qualities of E&J Brandy is its remarkable character. This is accomplished by a vertical blending of brandies of different ages from the finest white oak barrels which we personally have selected. This expensive and time consuming aging process also develops the full and natural brandy flavor of E&J Brandy.

What’s wrong here?

Character would be the sum total of a thing’s qualities, not one of them.

“This is accomplished”: There’s no clear referent for this. Character cannot be accomplished.

“Vertical blending”: Meaning that the brandies are poured in from above? I can find no evidence that “vertical blending” is a term generally used in brandy-making. It seems to be used only by E&J.

“Which we personally have selected”: Silly: the brandies cannot be blended without being selected. (Here are some fries. They are made from potatoes which I personally have selected.) But it may be the barrels that have been selected. Before they were filled? Afterwards?

“This expensive and time consuming aging process”: This second this is ungainly. (A good way to improve almost any piece of writing: reconsider every sentence beginning with this.) “Time consuming aging process”: redundant and repetitious [sic], and missing a hyphen.

“Also”: Also?

“The full and natural brandy flavor of E&J Brandy”: Yes, brandy should taste like brandy. The phrasing here reminds me of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

With the pretension and awkwardness removed, the E&J label might read like so:

Blended from brandies aged in white oak barrels, E&J is a brandy of distinction. Careful selection and aging develops E&J’s full, natural flavor.

I find plainness and understatement much more convincing. But I’m not about to buy a bottle of E&J and test the truth of my sentences. I like red wine (and sometimes beer, and sometimes bourbon).

Thanks, Joe, for this label.

[This post is no. 28 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)
Lemonade and lies

J.D. Salinger puts on his socks

In a 1968 photograph, now in Newsweek.

Related reading
All Salinger posts

Nelson Riddle on the Blackwing pencil

Composer and arranger Nelson Riddle liked the Blackwing:

Pencils should be of very soft lead, so that a minimum of pressure is needed to convey the marks to the paper, but the lead should be dense enough to be able to carry a sharp point, since clarity is essential. My favorite pencil is the Blackwing #602, by Eberhard Faber, but there may be many brands equal or superior to the Blackwing. Another important feature of a pencil is its eraser. It should be firm, though not dry, and since soft lead is quite easily blurred, it should be an eraser that makes a clean sweep. Some arrangers prefer a mechanical pencil with a refillable reservoir for lead, but I find that the lead in these pencils is quite often brittle, and the eraser wears out after a couple of packets of lead have been expended.

Nelson Riddle, Arranged by Nelson Riddle (Van Nuys, CA: Alfred Music Publishing, 1985).

Here’s a photograph of Nelson Riddle holding a pencil that shows the distinctive Blackwing ferrule. (Squint.)

Related posts
Blackwing 2: The Return
The new Blackwing pencil
Proust’s supplies
Stephen Sondheim on pencils, paper
John Steinbeck on the Blackwing pencil

Van Dyke Parks, getting things done

As Director of Audio-Visual Services for Warner Bros. Records:

“I was directly under Mo Ostin at WB Records (both architecturally and on the Corporate Organization Chart. I answered to only one man. That was Mo). I had memos printed: ‘From the Director of Audio-Visual Services — re: ———,’ and ‘Yes     ’ or ‘No     .’ It got things done, that memo.”

Quoted in Richard Henderson’s Song Cycle (New York: Continuum, 2010), a volume in the “33 1/3” series devoted to Van Dyke Parks’s 1968 album Song Cycle. Here’s a brief review.