Blogger is back, sort of

Blogger — the service, that is — is back, sort of. I’m waiting for three missing posts to reappear.

From the National Jukebox

At the Library of Congress, the National Jukebox is open for business. Here are a few items I’ve listened to, every one a winner:

Marian Anderson, “My Lord, What a Mornin’”

Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, “Old Fashioned Love”

The Dizzy Trio, “Hayseed Rag”

Marion Harris, “After You’ve Gone”

Billy Murray and Ed Smalle, “Choo-Choo (I Gotta Hurry Home)” (An early Ellington tune)

Original Dixieland Jazz Band, “Tiger Rag”

Aileen Stanley and Gene Austin, “When My Sugar Walks Down the Street (All the Little Birdies Go Tweet-Tweet-Tweet)”

Fred Van Eps, “Ragging the Scale”

Paul Whiteman, “Fascinating Rhythm”

Rudy Wiedoeft, “Saxophobia”

[If you’re using an iPad, no soap: everything’s Flash.]

Word of the day: subitize

The word-of-the-day from Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day is subitize (SOO-bi-tyz):

verb tr., intr.: To perceive, without counting, the number of objects in a small group.

From Latin subitus (sudden), from past participle of subire (to appear suddenly), from sub- (under) + ire (to go). Earliest documented use: 1949.

When you throw a die, you don’t count the number of pips to determine the value of the throw. You subitize. Now here’s a word you want to use when you take part in one of those “How many marbles are in the jar?” contests, though subitizing works only for a small group of items. Estimates of the upper limit of humans’ subitizing capability range from four to seven. Subitizing also depends on the arrangement of the objects.

Try this subitizing test.

Reading about this word (new to me) made me think of a sentence from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Thoureau” (1862):

From a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp.

I suspect though that Thoreau was relying upon muscle memory, not subitizing. Oh well. Here’s a brief intro to Thoreau’s career in pencils.

DFW Endnote Generator

From the David Foster Wallace Endnote Generator.

Review: How to Write a Sentence

Stanley Fish. How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. New York. HarperCollins. 2011. $19.99.

In the summer of 1979, I taught a remedial writing course for incoming college freshmen. The idea was to get students up to speed in six weeks with the use of a workbook in sentence construction. I was a grad student teaching for the first time; the course design was not of my making. Page by page, we trudged through the workbook, and the students filled in blanks to create sentences of ever-increasing complexity. The students became virtuosi of sentence form, with words, phrases, and clauses falling into place. A typical piece of work went something like this: write a sentence with an introductory dependent clause, a compound subject, a non-restrictive clause, a transitive verb in the active voice, an indirect object, a direct object, and a prepositional phrase. Then came the final work of the course — writing an essay. Without blanks to fill in, the students fell back upon past habits of writing, and the results were disastrous. I remember reading the essays and wondering why my elders thought that constructing single sentences in a void was good preparation for writing.

And now I’m wondering why Stanley Fish thinks that constructing single sentences in a void is good preparation for writing. How to Write a Sentence though is hardly as programmatic as my 1979 workbook: Fish conceives of a sentence not as an arrangement of grammatical units but as a matter of “structures of logic and rhetoric within which and by means of which meanings — lots of them — can be generated.” A standard strategy in this book: present a sentence that does a certain sort of thing; imitate it; invite the reader to do the same. Here for instance is a sentence from Henry James, one that “filters [an] event through layers of reflection”:

When the porter’s wife (she used to answer the house-bell) announced “A gentleman — with a lady, sir,” I had, as I often had in those days, for the wish was father to the thought, an immediate vision of sitters.

And Fish’s imitation:

As he reached the crest of the hill and saw the house with its imposing spires — they looked like spears ready to impale him — the door, moving it seemed under its own power, opened.

“Not James by any means, but a passable cheap imitation,” Fish says. No, not James. But also just not a good sentence, with a strained and awkwardly sounded simile (spires, spears), a puzzling shift in perspective (as he looks at the spires, he sees the door?), and a perfunctory close. No strange “vision of sitters” here, just a door standing open, like a door. Fish apologizes for his imitations again and again: one “at least gestures in the direction” of Ford Madox Ford; another is “not as snappy and whiplike” as J.L. Austin, “but in the ballpark.” An imitation of Martin Luther King Jr. is “bathetic, even pathetic”; imitations of Jonathan Swift are “so lame.”

A reader might wonder: if this is the best Stanley Fish can do, what hope is there for me? Well, you just have to practice: “if you learn how to master the form, you can employ it ‘naturally’ when you have something important to say.” Become familiar with your tools, and “when an occasion of use turns up, you will be ready.” Keep at it, “and when it comes time to do it for real — to put this style in the service of a point you passionately want to make or an idea you want to champion — you will be ready.” No more ready, I suspect, than my students in the summer of 1979: it defies plausibility that imitating a handful of sentences (and taking up another Fish exercise — expanding three-word sentences into larger wholes) will make for good writing.

“You will be ready”: I’ve yet to figure out the you of How to Read a Sentence. At times, I suspect that the aspiring maker of passionate points and champion of ideas is an upscale middle-aged person. Who else is meant to enjoy Fish’s joking suggestion to use the word parataxis at a cocktail party? Yet HarperCollins is pitching this book as useful for college writing courses. (I have the e-mail to prove it.) And Adam Haslett’s cover blurb presents the book as a worthy successor to an earlier classroom text: “Both deeper and more democratic than The Elements of Style.” I’d welcome such a book, but How to Write a Sentence is nothing of the sort. Its most valuable pages are those where the emphasis on imitation drops out and Fish focuses on reading, performing the close analyses of sentences that one finds in his work on seventeenth-century prose. For sentence-writing inspiration, Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (Graphics Press, 2006) is a far better choice. It’s a clear influence on How to Write a Sentence: both books begin by taking up the same Anthony Burgess sentence, and Fish quotes from Tufte’s comments on it. The difference is that Tufte presents more than a thousand sentences, patiently, methodically, and not for purposes of direct imitation but to show the reader many, many kinds of things that sentences can do. That’s what I call inspiration.

Related posts
Battling The Elements
Fish on Strunk and White

[There are some surprising mistakes in How to Write a Sentence: phrases identified as clauses (“a man in possession of a good fortune,” “in want of a wife”), parataxis badly explained, four lines from William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” turned into two, and a comma splice (page 73). Does no one check these things?]

“[F]lapping his arms like Roddy McDowall”

A puzzling sentence:

Lane Dean imagines running out into the field in an enormous circle, flapping his arms like Roddy McDowall.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011).

Such serendipity: the movie Elaine and I watched last night explains it. Alan “Mollymauk” Musgrave, McDowall’s character in Lord Love a Duck, flaps and squawks with abandon. His name? That of a bird.

Other Pale King passages
Deskwork : Dullness : Heroism

Blackwing sighting

[Harvey Korman and Blackwing pencil. Click for a larger view.]

Lord Love a Duck (1966) is a dark comedy directed by George Axelrod, who wrote the screenplay for The Manchurian Candidate (1962). That alone says watch it. The film mocks beach movies, education (high-school Botany has been renamed Plant Skills for Life), family life, home decor (a living-room conversation pit so deep that it echoes), sexual mores, teenaged in-groups, and everything else. As Axelrod says in a promotional trailer, whatever it might be, Lord Love a Duck is against it.

Even Blackwing pencils. Silly high-school principal Weldon Emmett (“e-double-m, e-double-t”) has a cupful on his desk. He does everything with them but write.

Related reading
Other Blackwing posts (via Pinboard)
Is there a pencil in The House? (More pencils in the movies)

[The Concise New Partidge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2008) explains “Lord love-a-duck” as “a mild expression of shock or suprise.” The expression turns up in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): “‘Lord love a duck,’ he said. ‘Look at what I’m standing drinks to!’”]

Happy Mother’s Day

[Photograph by James Leddy, August 11, 1957.]

That’s my mom, Louise Leddy, and me, smiling at my dad, probably in Owl’s Head Park in Brooklyn. When I look at the photographs in my “baby book,” I kinda suspect that we lived in the park.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. And Happy Mother’s Day to all.

Record Service

Founded in 1969 as a record-buying co-op, Record Service stood at 621 E. Green Street, Champaign, Illinois, less than a block from the University of Illinois — “in the heart of Campustown,” as the card’s flip side puts it. Record Service was a very good record store — I always found something unexpected and worthwhile when browsing there. I remember making premeditated purchases too: Robert Johnson’s Complete Recordings (1990 — LPs!), Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1997), Louis Armstrong’s Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (2000). Sony’s Armstrong set was a disaster, with execrable remastering and shoddy cardboard sleeves that left glue all over the discs. The store gave me credit, which I immediately spent on CDs to replace some worn Thelonious Monk LPs. Thanks, Record Service.

You can guess where this post is going: Record Service folded, in 2004. Figaro’s, a sister store for classical records at the same address, one flight up, had folded sometime earlier. Here’s a photograph of the way they were. 621 E. Green now houses a sushi restaurant on its first floor, townhouses above.

It was in Record Service that I first had the feeling that perhaps I was getting a little too old to be frequenting record stores. I never let it stop me. I wish I could still walk in and feel slightly out of place.

Further reading
Profile of Record Service owner Phil Strang (the217.com)
Profile: Record Service (CMJ New Music Report)
Figaro’s a Power in University Town (Billboard)
The end of Record Service (CMJ New Music Report)

Related posts
New York, 1964: record stores
Record stores (Relic Rack, Sam Goody’s, J&R)

[I found the discount card while reaching for an envelope in which to stick the water bill.]

Van Dyke Parks on Bananastan, cont’d.

In an interview with Mojo, Van Dyke Parks offers some more details about his forthcoming 7"-vinyl singles. And some observations about age and resilience:

“I know my best work is ahead of me. That’s the only thing that gets me out of the decrepitude of my advanced age. Every day the hand is farther from the head! Just to play the things I played when I was a brunette, I want to tell you, it ain’t for sissies! And I beat the shit [out] of the piano!”

A related post
Van Dyke Parks on Bananastan (with Art Spiegelman’s label design)
Van Dyke Parks, two singles (imaginary liner notes)