E.B. White was born.

From the “Book Bench” at the New Yorker:

E. B. White was born on this day in 1899. He’d not approve of that construction, I fear. Nor would Strunk. So how about, for colloquial clarity, if not quite temporal precision: today is E. B. White’s birthday.

Ian Crouch, E.B. White, on His Eighteenth Birthday

Was born: aha. The passive voice. Here is some of what The Elements of Style in fact says about it, under the the (in)famous heading “Use the active voice”:

The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive. . . . This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.

Completely unobjectionable advice (accompanied, I should note, by several illustrative sentences). A writer who disapproves of was born is a writer whose ideas about language no one need take seriously. But neither Strunk nor White is that writer. Which is not to say that The Elements of Style is beyond criticism.

Related posts
All Strunk and White posts (via Pinboard)
The Elements of Style, one more time (Lots of criticism)
Zimmer on Strunk and White (on the “blanket rule” against the passive)

[The quoted passage appears in all editions of The Elements of Style.]

Duke Ellington, pothead? No.

From Edward McClelland at NBC Chicago:

[A]nyone who knows Duke Ellington knows he was one of the music world’s pioneering potheads. Ellington got high on a regular basis, and once said “jazz was born on whiskey, raised on marijuana, and will die on heroin.” (He was probably referring to Charlie Parker, who preferred stronger drugs.) Ellington also composed the song “Chant of the Weed,” which may have been about his favorite pastime. We don’t know for sure, since the song has no lyrics (a la “Eight Miles High”), but the dragging beat is a strong hint.

Say what?

If Ellington was a “pothead,” his use was a very well-kept secret. In everything I’ve read on Ellington, I cannot recall a single reference to his using marijuana. Ellington drank (and joked that he retired as an undefeated champion), and he smoked cigarettes (Pall Malls), and he once quipped, “I never in my whole life smoked anything which hadn’t got printing on it.”

I can find no source for the alleged quotation concerning alcohol, marijuana, and heroin. Drugs aside, it’s a curious quotation, given Ellington’s distaste for the term jazz and for all musical categories other than good and bad.

And it was Don Redman who wrote “Chant of the Weed.”

Could McClelland be mistaking Ellington for Louis Armstrong?

Update, August 8, 2011: My July 11 e-mails to Edward McClelland and NBC Chicago have received no replies. Nothing in McClelland’s piece, not even the plain errors of fact about “Chant of the Weed” and “Eight Miles High,” has been corrected.

[“I never in my whole life”: quoted in Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977).]

Telephone exchange names on screen

[Click for a larger view.]

Dawn breaks on Manhattan, in Sweet Smell of Success (dir.
Alexander Mackendrick, 1957). The view is purportedly from an apartment at 1619 Broadway, the Brill Building, between 49th and 50th, where powerful columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) lives with his sister Susan (Susan Harrison). Hart’s Guide to New York City (1964) locates the Warner Theatre (just right of center, bottom) at 1585 Broadway, now the address of the Morgan Stanley Building. This shot might not be from the Brill Building, but we’re at least in the neighborhood.

I can make nothing of that Howard on the left: the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge stood at 851 Eighth Avenue (now the address of an Hampton Inn) and bore no resemblance to the building in this shot.

Sweet Smell of Success is a lurid and compelling story of ego and subservience, with an over-the-top screenplay by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets and great cinematography from James Wong Howe. Lancaster, Harrison, and Tony Curtis are superb. And Martin Milner does a fine job as a West Coast jazz musician.

Oh, the exchange name. Did you spot it?

A 1955 list of recommended exchange names gives only one possibility for PE: PErshing. PErshing it is.

Sweet Smell of Success is available, beautifully restored, from the Criterion Collection.

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 : Murder, My Sweet : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Side Street : This Gun for Hire

Pogue, Hunsecker

At the New York Times, David Pogue is in hot (but not boiling) water after a recent presentation to public-relations professionals, titled “Pitch Me, Baby.” One detail:

On a later slide, he displays eight recent New York Times columns and identifies five as having come from public relations people. Pogue explains that, as a reviewer of new gadgets, there is no comprehensive database he can rely on to learn about new stuff. Hence he relies on companies and their hired pitchmen to tell him about new products.

Thus I had to laugh when watching Sweet Smell of Success (dir. Alexander Mackendrick, 1957) last night. Here is famed columnist J.J. Hunsecker, “The Eyes of Broadway” (played by Burt Lancaster):

“The day I can’t get along without a press agent’s handouts, I’ll close up shop and move to Alaska, lock, stock, and barrel.”

xkcd: “Strunk and White”

Today’s xkcd: “Strunk and White.”

[E.B. White was born on July 11, 1899. Here’s a Wikipedia article that helps to explain the joke in the comic.]

Salt war

An article at Scientific American suggests that excess salt is not particularly dangerous to human health:

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine — an excellent measure of prior consumption — the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

Melinda Wenner Moyer, It’s Time to End the War on Salt

Reading such articles makes me think there’s no point in reading such articles: it seems that everything one knows turns out to be, at some point, wrong. (Smoke: good!) But what I know is that once one gets some distance from processed foods, they taste too dang salty.

[With apologies to The Bride of Frankenstein.]

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

Style is in no way an embellishment, as certain people think, it is not even a question of technique; it is, like color with certain painters, a quality of vision, a revelation of a private universe which each one of use sees and which is not seen by others. The pleasure an artist gives us is to make us know an additional universe.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Antoine Bibesco, November (?) 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Related reading
All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Hi and Bell

[Hi and Lois, July 10, 2011.]

Today’s Hi and Lois is a grand tour through the brave new world of self-service: Hi Flagston takes his bottles and cans to a recycling center, buys a newspaper from a machine, pumps his own gas (from a rather retro pump), scans his own groceries, stops at an ATM (helpfully marked “ATM”), rents a DVD from a Redbox-like machine, and dials an automated help-line. Meanwhile, son Chip wonders where the summer jobs are.

I found myself paying too much attention to the panel above. Do you see why?

I remember the last time I saw a Bell System Public Telephone sign: last September, at Schubas Tavern in Chicago. It was too dark to take a decent photograph. The above photograph, “Bell Telephone Sign,” is by mdf3530 and is licensed under a Creative Commons 2.0 License. Thanks, mdf3530, for sharing your work.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (via Pinboard)
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (At Schubas Tavern)

Betty Ford (1918–2011)

From the New York Times:

Betty Ford, the outspoken and much-admired wife of President Gerald R. Ford who overcame alcoholism and an addiction to pills and helped found one of the best-known rehabilitation centers in the nation, died Friday in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 93.

The Times quotes Betty Ford’s 1987 book Betty: A Glad Awakening: “I am an ordinary woman who was called onstage at an extraordinary time.” Ordinary? Read the obituary and see if you agree.

Theodore Dalrymple on handwriting

Theodore Dalrymple draws an extreme conclusion:

Those who learn to write only on a screen will have more difficulty in distinguishing themselves from each other, and since the need to do so will remain, they will adopt more extreme ways of doing so. Less handwriting, then, more social pathology.

The Handwriting Is on the Wall (Wall Street Journal)

Two observations:

It seems doubtful that young people as a rule now distinguish themselves from one another by means of handwriting.

Dalrymple’s claim here would seem to argue against everything from one-inch margins to school uniforms.

A related post
Cursive writing in Indiana

[Editors, please, no more headlines with handwriting and wall.]