Snow, snow, snow

Earlier this morning, I dreamed that it was snowing. These were giant flakes, perhaps a foot across. I saw them through our living-room window, which looked onto a city sidewalk that had already been shoveled. The crews are out early, I thought. Analyst, do your worst.

[Illustration by Harry McNaught, from Weather: A Guide to Phenomena and Forecasts, a Golden Science Book (1965).]

Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace

From Boston’s WBUR, March 2001, Judy Swallow talks with Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace about modern American usage. My favorite exchange, Swallow and Wallace:

“Do you want your students to be SNOOTs?”

“That’s a really good question. No, to be a SNOOT is a lonely, stressful way to be. [Garner laughs.] It’s, you know, having a big red button which is pushed all the time. And to be honest, I would prefer to be less SNOOTy than I am.”

But as Wallace goes on to say, he wants his students to be able to speak and write in ways that convey their credibility and learning.

Related viewing
Garner asks Wallace about genteelisms (LawProse.org)

[In the essay “Authority and American Usage,” Wallace glosses SNOOT as his “nuclear family’s nickname for a really extreme usage fanatic.” The acronym stands for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time.” “Authority and American Usage” appears in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). The essay first appeared in Harper’s as “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.”]

Ebert on Murdoch

Roger Ebert on Rupert Murdoch: “This man has done more to harm journalism in America and Britain than any other person. I cannot speak for Australia.”

The Dirty Digger (Roger Ebert’s Journal)

Lieutenant Columbo’s notebook

[Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo. From the Columbo episode “Murder in Malibu,” first aired May 14, 1990.]

For once he has his own pencil. More often he borrows.

Another shot from this episode reveals the notebook to be an Ampad Citadel (no longer manufactured). Appropriately rumpled, no?

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Union Station

[The closeup is upside-down for readability.]

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.]