Mississippi John Hurt for Chevy

Flipping through channels, I was surprised to hear the guitar and voice of Mississippi John Hurt in a Chevrolet commercial. Hurt’s fingerpicking style has turned up in commercials before: with products like coffee and lemonade, the sound signifies “old-time goodness” (and rightly so, no matter the quality of the product advertised). To my knowledge, the Chevy commercial marks the first time Hurt himself has been heard in a commercial, in a 1963 Library of Congress recording of “You Are My Sunshine,” played in C position, with the guitar tuned two whole-steps down.

I suspect that someone at the ad agency really, really loves Hurt’s music: note that the African-American dad in the commercial (ten seconds in) is wearing a hat that resembles Hurt’s signature fedora, dark brown with a tan band. Hardly coincidental, I’d say.

Why Maxwell House has never used Hurt’s “Coffee Blues” in a commercial is beyond me: “Ain’t Maxwell House all right!”

A related post
Mississippi John Hurt (From Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest)

Related reading
Mississippi John Hurt Museum

[Yes, The Lovin’ Spoonful took their name from “Coffee Blues.”]

Garner on writing in law school

Bryan A. Garner, in a New York Times forum on law school:

Most legal scholarship is poorly written and is mired in nonpractical abstraction that few can understand and fewer still can benefit from. Most law professors don’t know how to write well, so they could hardly teach the subject if they wanted to. On top of that, lawyers of all kinds — both academic lawyers and practicing ones — rationalize their linguistic ineptitude by claiming that legal jargon is necessary (most of it isn’t); that writing instruction is elementary, remedial stuff (it should progress to advanced techniques); and that writing style doesn’t matter anyway. But it does matter: clear writing equates with clear thinking, and judges and employers cry out for both. Put all these things together, and you have serious educational pathologies.

Garner’s suggested start toward a cure: “much more research, writing and editing,” with frequent short papers (revision required) in all second- and third-year classes.

Note, by the way, how well Garner writes.

[Garner recommends the Oxford comma. The Times must be responsible for "research, writing[,] and editing.”]

Norway

The news from Norway grows grimmer as we learn more:

Blasts and Gun Attack in Norway; 7 Dead (New York Times)

I have friends in Oslo and would really like to know that they’re okay.

(They are.)

Counterfeit-coin puzzle

From Futility Closet: “You have nine coins and a balance scale. One of the coins is lighter than the others. Is it possible to identify it in only two weighings?”

(via Boing Boing)

Ladies and gentlemen, Ethel Waters

It’s so hot,
A chicken laid an
Egg on the street — and it fried!

From 1933, Ethel Waters sings Irving Berlin’s “Heat Wave.”

Pale King review

The July-August 2011 issue of World Literature Today has my review of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King. It’s a short review, but it makes several points I’ve seen nowhere else. (And they’re good ones.) The link is to the journal’s website; the review is in print (pages 70–71), and online via subscribing libraries.

Waiting on a copy of The Pale King and ignoring all discussion of the book until after I’d written a review made for a strange adventure in not-reading. No spoilers!

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

DFW as a character in a novel

Willa Paskin at New York reports on a character in a new Jeffrey Eugenides novel who strongly resembles David Foster Wallace. The character in question, Leonard Baskin, is a double major (biology and philosophy) who chews tobacco and wears a bandanna. There are several more points of resemblance. Paskin notes that

the similarities are so iconically David Foster Wallace (a bandanna and chew are not common accoutrements) that Eugenides, who did not have a well-known or documented friendship with Foster Wallace, must intentionally be calling him to mind.

DFW in someone else’s fiction: I guess it was bound to happen.

Here in east-central Illinois, bandannas and chew are indeed common accouchamacallems, though they might not always be acknowledged as such.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

[Like Hal Incandenza in Infinite Jest, Wallace (not Foster Wallace) dipped (not chewed) Kodiak.]

Overheard

A woman looking at a poster for a baby-product expo:

“I’m in heaven right now looking at this. All right, where’s my cigarettes?”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (via Pinboard)

Fred Astaire on What’s My Line?

From 1955 and 1959. What grace. What modesty.

A related post
John Ashbery and Fred Astaire on The Mike Douglas Show

Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten

[Click for a larger view.]

Here’s a film I immediately know that I want to see, Vadim Jendreyko’s Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten [The woman with the five elephants], a documentary about Svetlana Geier, who spent much of her life translating Dostoyevsky into German. You see the results of her work above.

Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten (Film website, in English, French, and German)
Surviving To Conquer Dostoevsky’s “5 Elephants” (NPR)

[Photograph from the film website.]