Farewell, Liane Hansen

Liane Hansen hosted her last Weekend Edition Sunday this morning. NPR has a timeline of her twenty-two years with the show.

Liane Hansen is one of my favorite radio people. I especially admire her intelligence and tact as an interviewer. You hear that same intelligence and tact when she ventures an answer in Will Shortz’s Sunday Puzzle segments: she never outdoes the contestant playing by telephone.

I was lucky to talk with Liane on one such telephone back in the 1990s, when I got to play the Sunday Puzzle on the air. As everything was made ready for taping, we talked for a minute or two about what it was like having young children in the house. Liane was reminiscing (I think); my kids were playing downstairs.

[Yes, I still have my Weekend Edition lapel pin.]

*

Three-and-a-half years later: found it.

The OED’s first-place verb

In the Oxford English Dictionary, run has overtaken set as the verb with the most meanings: 645.

On where one belongs

Writer, teacher, consultant Peter F. Drucker, on figuring out where one belongs:

A small number of people know very early where they belong. Mathematicians, musicians, and cooks, for instance, are usually mathematicians, musicians, and cooks by the time they are four or five years old. Physicians usually decide on their careers in their teens, if not earlier. But most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties. By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths? How do I perform? and, What are my values? And then they can and should decide where they belong.

Managing Oneself (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2008)

When I spotted this well-designed little book, I had to buy it. The text is a Drucker essay first published in the Harvard Business Review in 1999. Managing Oneself would make a great and perhaps surprising gift for a high-school or college graduate.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

“We are locked in history, and they were not”: director Werner Herzog, in his documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), an exploration of the Chauvet Cave in southern France.

This film is a powerful reminder of the vastness of time and of one’s own small place in it. My favorite moments: archaeologist Jean-Michel Geneste speaking of the human impulse to make marks on strange objects, and master perfumer Maurice Maurin seeking out hidden caves with his sense of smell.

Elaine and I saw this 3-D film in two dimensions. I doubt that we missed much. If we did, please let me know.

[Making marks on strange objects: like this screen, for instance.]

Re: tornadoes

Tornadoes were, in our part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up. They made no sense. Houses blew not out but in. Brothels were spared while orphanages next door bought it. Dead cattle were found three miles from their silage without a scratch on them. Tornadoes are omnipotent and obey no law. Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration. I believe now that I knew all this without knowing it, as a kid.

David Foster Wallace, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (New York: Back Bay Books, 1997)

Related reading
American Red Cross Expands Relief Effort as More Tornadoes Batter Midwest (American Red Cross)
Missouri and Minnesota: how to help (The Maddow Blog)

Telephone exchange names on screen

Though not nearly as baffling as The Big Sleep (dir. Howard Hawks, 1946), Murder, My Sweet (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1944) is the kind of movie with which I choose to concentrate on atmosphere rather than plot. The atmosphere includes much cigarette smoke and three fine glimpses of exchange names: let’s call them WHitehall, OLympia, and GRidley. Where did I get those names? Not from a hat: from a list of Ma Bell’s Officially Recommended Exchange Names.

Dick Powell really is a fine Philip Marlowe. How did that ever happen?

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Side Street

Storybook Gardens

“Storybook Gardens has run its course. What kids know about these characters? Jack and the Bean Stalk, maybe, or Humpty Dumpty. We’re at a new generation now”: in the Wisconsin Dells, Storybook Gardens is no more.

Leonard Kastle (1929–2011)

Leonard Kastle, director of The Honeymoon Killers, has died. The Honeymoon Killers is his one film, and it’s a great one.

A related post
The Honeymoon Killers (my review)

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?