National Handwriting Day

It’s National Handwriting Day.

[With apologies to Danny & The Juniors.]

Three centuries of diaries

Just in time for National Handwriting Day: The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives, at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Six degrees of Richard Nixon

Can you work out your six (or fewer) degrees of separation from Richard Nixon? Yes, that Richard Nixon. Comments from Normann on my post about syllabus week have moved me to pose this question.

My Nixon number is two. I have met bassist Milt Hinton and trumpeter Clark Terry, both of whom played at Duke Ellington’s seventieth-birthday party in the Nixon White House (1969). I have another link that is both more and less solid: as a student, I spent a summer proofreading at Rogers & Wells (cap rogers amp cap wells, in proofspeak). Rogers was William P. Rogers, Nixon’s first Secretary of State. I never met Rogers, though, and I’m not sure that he was ever in the building.

But again, can you work out your six (or fewer) degrees of separation from Richard Nixon? You’re welcome to show how in the comments.

Related reading at Wikipedia
Six degrees of separation
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
Erdős number

[Richard Nixon, in his first presidential debate with John F. Kennedy, September 26, 1960. Photograph (here cropped) by Paul Schutzer. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Typography PDFs from FontShop

“Time for ‘the talk’”:

You may notice that you’re changing. You’re noticing different letterforms. You may feel different around them. Don’t be embarrassed; these feelings are natural. A few basics can help you through the awkward years.

That’s an excerpt from FontShop’s Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Love and Typography. It’s a free PDF, one of nine you can find via the link.

I like the way typographers (or at least some typographers) are able to explain, patiently and without condescension, things that are ridiculously obvious to them. From another FontShop PDF, Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips: Seven Rules for Better Typography:

Quotes can have different shapes. They generally look like “this”, and can be remembered as beginning and ending quotes by thinking of “66” and “99”. Beginning quotes are found on the Mac by pressing option-[; closing quotes, option-shift-[. The apostrophe is simply a raised comma, the shape of a ’9 in most typefaces. It is identical to the closing single quote, while the open single quote looks like a ‘6. Beginning single quotes are found on the Mac by pressing option-]; the apostrophe and closing single quote, option-shift-].

See how nice? May all teachers be that patient.

A related post
Helvetica (Erik Spiekermann: “I’m obviously a typomaniac.”)

Boycott a Meeting Day

“Every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead.” From 37signals: Boycott a Meeting Day. I especially like the vandalized stock photos.

Syllabus week

Have you heard? It’s “syllabus week.” Or was, last week. Urban Dictionary helps: “the first week of class, when syllabi are passed out . . . a basic waste of time.”

As you might guess from the definition, the term is one that college students (not faculty) use. I’m newly aware of it, I admit. Syllabus week seems to be an idea born of both wishful thinking (“No work!”) and diminished expectations (“No work!”). “Going over the syllabus,” as we say in pedagogy-speak, which means highlighting important matters and reading a few bits aloud, might take twenty minutes or so. It might even take a class meeting. But it doesn’t take a week.

A widespread belief that the first week of a college semester is “a basic waste of time” could have three unfortunate consequences. Younger, less confident faculty who believe that students expect (and are thus entitled to) a week of nothing might delay in getting down to the work of the course: they won’t want to alienate their charges early on. Faculty who plunge right in might begin to look like outliers. And students who aren’t yet showing up because they believe the first week to be a waste of time won’t be able to tell the difference.

A much smarter strategy for starting out: treat the first weeks of a semester as if they were the last ones. Work as if your grade depended upon it. (It does.)

A related post
New year’s resolutions (And academic life)

“I have a dream”

From the PBS NewsHour: fourth-graders from Washington, D.C.’s Watkins Elementary School read Martin Luther King’s 1963 speech.

MLK

[Photograph by Grey Villet, from the Life Photo Archive. The telegraphic description that accompanies the photograph: “Martin Luther King Trial Montgomery Alabama Integration.” On February 21, 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. was one of ninety-three people indicted on charges of leading an illegal boycott of Montgomery buses. On March 19, his trial began.]

The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community. A boycott is never an end within itself. It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor but the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption.

From “The Power of Nonviolence,” an address at the University of California at Berkeley, June 4, 1957.

Hooker ’n Heat

John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat, Hooker ’n Heat. Liberty Records, 1971.

John Lee Hooker, guitar and vocal
Alan Wilson, guitar, harmonica, piano
Henry Vestine, guitar
Antonio de la Barreda, bass
Fito de la Parra, drums

Messin’ with the Hook : The Feelin’ Is Gone : Send Me Your Pillow : Sittin’ Here Thinkin’ : Meet Me in the Bottom : Alimonia Blues : Driftin’ Blues : You Talk Too Much : Burnin’ Hell (w/Bernard Besman) : Bottle Up and Go : The World Today : I Got My Eyes on You : Whiskey and Wimmen’ : Just You and Me : Let's Make It : Peavine : Boogie Chillen No. 2

Recorded May 1970. All songs by John Lee Hooker except as noted.

Hooker ’n Heat came out on January 15, 1971, forty years ago today. Still in print, it holds up as well as ever. To my ears, it’s the best record John Lee Hooker made. It might be Canned Heat’s best too, despite the performing absence of lead singer Bob Hite, heard here only in bits of studio chatter and one hearty cheer.

Anyone who thinks of blues music as formally rigid — three chords, twelve bars — has never listened to John Lee Hooker, whose music is typically monochordal and most often without evenly measured choruses. Hooker’s approach, known as “the boogie,” is sometimes characterized as “primitive” (or worse, “primal”), but its fluid sense of time makes much blues performance sound pedestrian and predictable by comparison. Listen to any number of Hooker recordings from the 1950s and ’60s, and you’ll hear a musician at odds with his supporting cast, players who cannot bear to abandon the proper three-chord, twelve-bar form. At times it’s as if two records are playing.

What makes Hooker ’n Heat immediately stand out from so much of Hooker’s work is that Canned Heat follows the leader, with genuine empathy. As good as the solo performances here are (I’d pick “The Feelin’ Is Gone” and “Send Me Your Pillow”), the high points of Hooker ’n Heat come in Hooker’s duets with Alan Wilson and in performances with the full (or nearly full) band. The greatest of the Hooker-Wilson duets is “Burnin’ Hell,” which begins with a variation on a couplet from Son House’s “My Black Mama” (1930). Here’s House:

Yes, ’tain’t no heaven and ’tain’t no burnin’ hell,

Said where I’m goin’ when I die can’t nobody tell.

And Hooker:

Everybody talkin’ about it, burnin’ hell,
Ain’t no heaven, ain’t no burnin’ hell,
Where I die, where I go, can’t nobody tell.

“Burnin’ Hell” builds in intensity, as the singer goes down to the church-house to ask Deacon Jones to pray for him. The singer prays all night, and his insistence that there is no hell begins to sound like a desperate plea not to be sent there: “Ain’t gonna burn in, ain’t gonna burn in, burnin’ hell.” The Hooker-Wilson connection here is uncanny: Wilson, on harmonica, anticipating and responding at every turn, shaping this performance into a piece of existential drama. “I dig this kid’s harmonica,” Hooker says before this tune begins. “I don’t know how he follow me, but he do.” “Burnin’ Hell” has an intensity rare in Hooker’s music, rare in Wilson’s music, rare in anyone’s music.

With the band on board, Hooker hits what he calls “that groovy spot,” with great support from Henry Vestine, Antonio de la Barreda, and Fito de la Parra (who, like Wilson, are attentive to every shifting current). There are many great moments: Hooker’s sermonette in “Whiskey and Wimmen’,” his drop to his lowest (and lewdest) vocal register in “Just You and Me,” the way Wilson’s harmonica mimics Hooker’s guitar and voice in “Let’s Make It,” Hooker’s frenzied lament in “Peavine,” where he repeats the word gone fifteen times.

The best comes last, “Boogie Chillen No. 2,” eleven minutes and thirty-three seconds of it, with strong guitar solos by Henry Vestine and a brilliant harmonica solo by Wilson (with a switch of instruments midway to get to some low notes otherwise unavailable). Here too the Hooker-Wilson connection is clear: during Vestine’s first solo, Hooker says, “You hear that cat? On the harmonica? Let the cat hear you,” as if inviting a club audience to applaud. (Vestine then wraps things up.) And as the performance nears its end, Hooker shouts:

Alan! You feel good, and you feel good,
Just like I thought that you would now.

It was not to be. Alan Wilson died (by his own hand perhaps) a few months after these performances were recorded. Thus the murky, somber album cover. Every musician on Hooker ’n Heat is now gone, save for Fito de la Parra, leading Canned Heat to this day.


[Bob Hite, Fito de la Parra, Henry Vestine, John Lee Hooker, Antonio de la Barreda. A photograph of Alan Wilson hangs on the wall.]

Related posts
Alan Wilson
Canned Heat (Live in east-central Illinois)

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“[I]f your teachers force you to use two spaces, send them a link to this article. Use this as your subject line: ‘If you type two spaces after a period, you’re doing it wrong.’”