Blues idiom of the day: dust one’s broom

[From Stephen Calt, Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).]

Many young blues fans of the 1960s identified themselves researchers and specialists. Stephen Calt was and is the real thing — a scholar. He’s written the three best books on blues that I know: Barrelhouse Words, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues, and King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (the last with Gayle Dean Wardlow). Barrelhouse Words is endlessly enjoyable browsing.

[If the Rapture takes place tomorrow, this post will look especially well-timed. Hasty departures indeed. Rapture or no, I plan to be here on Monday.]

June 11, 2011: I just learned that Stephen Calt died in October 2010.

Unusual idiom of the day

Overheard in a used-book store, as the owner delegated tasks to an employee: “I don’t want to burden you out.”

Google Books (a useful informal way to check on words and phrases) turns up nothing. In the Oxford English Dictionary, burden out is obsolete and rare and means “outweigh”: “Whether … they have in them any weight, wherewith to burthen out Opinion” (1668).

I like burden out as an alternative to wear out, though I doubt I’ll ever use it. Reader, have you heard burden out used in this way?

First messy of 2011

Earlier this year I tracked the many appearances of the word messy in Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times book reviews. Today comes the first messy of 2011, in a review of Teju Cole’s novel Open City:

This outlook, combined with Julius’s solemnity about himself, make him a decidedly lugubrious narrator. And Mr. Cole’s failure to dramatize his alienation — or make it emblematic of some larger historical experience, as Sebald did with his displaced characters — impedes the reader’s progress while underscoring the messy, almost ad hoc nature of the overall narrative. What stands out in this flawed novel — so in need of some stricter editing — is Mr. Cole’s ambition, his idiosyncratic voice and his eclectic, sometimes electric journalistic eye.

Yes, that’s an agreement error in the first quoted sentence. In need of some stricter editing, yes.

Related reading
Michiko Kakutani, messy

[One mess in 2011, in a review of Bill Clinton’s Back to Work: “Mr. Clinton lays out various ideas for increasing bank lending and corporate investment, unwinding the mortgage mess and amending tax laws to give corporations incentives to bring more money back to the United States.”]

That said,

A modest suggestion to improve early-twenty-first-century discourse: remove that said from the starts of sentences. The phrase is at least slightly pompous, signaling that the speaker or writer has said something and is now about to say something else, something — gosh — contradictory. And the phrase has at least a trace of Richard Nixon’s annunciatory “Let me say this about that.” That said now seems to be everywhere: watch just an hour of CNN or MSNBC if you doubt me.

Sometimes that said is unnecessary or nonsensical, as in this passage from a recent New York Times restaurant review by Stephanie Lyness:

The fish soup was good, too, particularly in combination with the croutons, topped with rouille and grated cheese, that accompany it. (That said, our bowl was delivered without the promised croutons and toppings, but once we requested them, our waitress returned with a newly warmed, fully garnished bowl of soup with alacrity.)

Deleting that said removes nothing of the second sentence’s meaning. If anything, the deletion improves the sentence by avoiding two contradictions: but our croutons and toppings were missing, but we asked for and got them.

In a sentence whose that said is not unnecessary or nonsensical, another word or phrase can more clearly signal the relationship of one statement to another. Consider these excerpts from a recent Times column by Paul Krugman:

Kudos to Mark Weisbrot for saying the unsayable, and making a case for Greek exit from the euro.

I agree with a lot of what he says, but am still not ready to counsel that step, for a couple of reasons. . . .

[The reasons follow.]

That said, Weisbrot is right in saying that the program for Greece is not working; it’s not even close to working.

It’s easy to devise different phrasing:

Still, Weisbrot is right in saying that the program for Greece is not working; it’s not even close to working.

Weisbrot is of course right in saying that the program for Greece is not working; it’s not even close to working.

Weisbrot though is right in saying that the program for Greece is not working; it’s not even close to working.

Is there anything wrong with saying or writing that said? No. But making explicit the relationship between two statements is a good way to make clear what one thinks. And when a phrase becomes overused and tiresome, avoiding it makes sense. See also simply put.

Bob Flanigan (1926–2011)

From the New York Times:

Bob Flanigan, a founding member of the Four Freshmen, the well-scrubbed tight-harmony group begun more than 60 years ago, when all of its members really were undergraduates, died on Sunday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 84.

Bob Flanigan in a 2009 interview: “I sang all the high parts, and I must say, I did it very carefully.” Why? Because everything was too high: “I had to really push it to get it to come out in tune.” The Four Freshmen sound was a profound influence on Brian Wilson and, thus, on the Beach Boys, who covered “Graduation Day” and “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring.”

YouTube has a small sampling of the Four Freshmen. The big treat: a 1964 performance for Japanese television in seven parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. In the first clip, from left to right: Ross Barbour, Bob Flanigan, Ken Albers, Bill Comstock.

Also at YouTube: compare and contrast the Four Freshmen and the Beach Boys.

What happens in the original Election ending

All over the Internets this afternoon: news of the discovery of an unlabeled flea-market videotape with the original ending of Alexander Payne’s 1999 film Election. YouTube has already yanked the clip in response to a copyright claim from Paramount Pictures. What happens, briefly:

We see Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick) sitting in an office. “Hey, Professor, someone to see you,” someone calls to him. We then see that Mr. M. is working as a car salesman, and he’s been summoned to the showroom floor because a customer has asked for him. That customer is of course Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon). She needs a car for college. Where did she get in? Everywhere she applied, but she’s going to Northwestern. Good school, Mr. M. says.

We then see them in the lot. Does Tracy want something practical or something sporty? Sporty. Mr. M. talks up the advantages of the Ford Escort, which is sporty and practical and in Tracy’s price range. It’s also a very safe car. Ford calls it the “world car.” He begins to describe an attractive options package. He asks why Tracy’s doing this, if she’s trying to humiliate him. No, Tracy says. But she asks if there’s someplace they can talk.

They sit in the car, and Tracy says that there’s something she has to ask: was Mr. M. really going to let Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) be president all year and just watch her suffer? Mr. M. explains that he had some personal problems at the time and took them out on Tracy. “Can I take that as an apology?” she asks. Yes.

Then they’re on a test drive. “I have an idea,” Tracy says, and she turns down a street and parks outside what we now figure out is her house. She runs inside. The house is on a rundown street with a row of grain silos at its end. Some of the garbage from the cans in front of Tracy’s house has spilled into the street. Mr. M. steps from the car and picks up the garbage. It’s pretty clear that he’s thinking through the contrast between perky, proper Tracy and her dilapidated surroundings. Tracy returns with a yearbook. “First one I’m not in,” Mr. M. says, or words to that effect. Tracy asks him to sign it. She confesses that she’s scared that she’s not ready for college. Mr. M. assures her that she’ll be fine. Alas, the quality of the YouTube clip is (or was) so poor that what he then writes in the yearbook is unreadable.

Election is my favorite high-school film. If anyone can add to this account or make a correction, please do. I’m working from memory — one viewing before the clip disappeared.

*

October 7, 2014: The ending has returned to YouTube.

[The film's original ending appears to follow, at least loosely, the ending of Tom Perrotta’s novel. The Daily What has more on why the ending changed.]

The Pale King, making conversation

It’s Russell speaking, in a restaurant, to a woman who’s just removed her chewing gum from her mouth and placed it in a Kleenex:

“Do you suppose it’s so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don’t know at all primarily because of all the previously exchanged information and shared experiences between two people who know each other well, or because maybe it’s only with people we already know well and know know us well that we don’t go through the awkward mental process of subjecting everything we think of saying or bringing up as a topic of light conversation to a self-conscious critical analysis and evaluation that manages to make anything we think of proposing to say to the other person seem dull or stupid or banal or on the other hand maybe overly intimate or tension-producing?”

“…”

“…”

“What did you say your name was again?”

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

The logic of Wallace’s ellipses is a wonderful thing: she says nothing; he says nothing; and then she asks a question. The awkward silence itself becomes a form of conversation.

Other Pale King excerpts
Deskwork : Dullness : Heroism

“The kids”

This photograph of “the kids” is a sequel to one that Elaine took almost two years ago, when our daughter Rachel graduated from college. Today it was our son Ben’s turn. Our family is now 75% Phi Beta Kappa. Represent! Elaine went to a trade school (Juilliard): no ΦBK there.

Yesterday, I was a mess, scattered and wired. “Big changes in our family,” I explained to my family, who pointed out to me that it’s not our family that’s changing: it’s circumstances. Yes, they are, in a way that makes all of us excited about what’s to come.

Congradulations, Ben!

[Photograph by Michael Leddy, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 13, 2011.]

“Death to high school English”

As a high-school student, Kim Brooks loved English class. Now she has second thoughts:

Only now, a decade and a half later, after seven years of teaching college composition, have I started to consider the possibility that talking about classics might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student, the student who is college-bound but not particularly gifted in letters or inspired by the literary arts. I’ve begun to wonder if this typical high school English class, dividing its curriculum between standardized test preparation and the reading of canonical texts, might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write.

Brooks’s “Death to high school English” would make a provocative first piece of reading for anyone teaching college writing in the fall.

My quick memories of high-school English: The Bald Soprano, Dandelion Wine, diagramming sentences, The Glass Bead Game, grammar, The Martian Chronicles, grammar, The Metamorphosis, diagramming sentences, Oedipus Rex, grammar, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, grammar. In other words, lit and grammar. What did you do in English class?

Thanks to Daughter Number Three for pointing me to Brooks’s essay.

[I prefer the hyphen in “high-school English.” Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage on hyphens in phrasal adjectives: “Reputable newspaper publishers are as conscientious about this point as reputable book publishers.” Reputable bloggers too. Reposted after the Blogger outage of May 2011.]

Getting my ducks in a row

Day one: Elaine and I watch the film Lord Love a Duck.

Day two: I find a reference to the film in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.

Day three: I begin reading Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: “‘Lord love a duck,’ summarized a boy holding a passkey, and Oedipa decided this was Miles.”

[Reposted after the Blogger outage of May 2011.]