Poetry stamps

I just went to check whether the poet William Carlos Williams has appeared on a United States postage stamp. He hasn’t. But it turns out that the Postal Service just announced a 2012 set of stamps honoring American poets: Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E.E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and Williams. Welcome news. The literary critic Hugh Kenner, in a documentary about Williams: “A great poet is one who makes a difference to the art of poetry. I think it’s as simple as that. And he made more difference to American poetry than anyone other than Walt Whitman.”

Related reading
Rutherford native and author of Paterson poem commemorated in stamp (Northjersey.com)

Stamps of the living

The New York Times reports that beginning in 2012, the United States Postal Service will begin considering the non-dead as stamp subjects:

When the news broke Monday on the Web sites of various news organizations, including The New York Times, readers began promoting their favorite candidates. Popular nominees included Lady Gaga, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Bob Dylan. CBS News gave readers a choice, listing options like Neil Armstrong (very popular) and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (not so much).

Armstrong and Dylan, yes. If there is a Gates stamp, there will have to be a Jobs stamp first, so that the Gates stamp’s designer has something to imitate.

What living person would you like to see on a U.S. stamp? Pete Seeger comes first to my mind. Among the dead, Eudora Welty, who did, after all, write the short story “Why I Live at the P.O.”

Blackwing sightings

It’s reassuring to know that I’m not the only person noticing supplies in film. At the Blackwing Pages, there are sightings of Blackwing pencils in The Glenn Miller Story (dir. Anthony Mann, 1954) and Unfaithfully Yours (dir. Preston Sturges, 1948).

A related post
A Blackwing in Lord Love a Duck

[Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items.]

Pocket notebook sighting

[“You see, there’s five more weeks’ interest”: Abe Reles (Peter Falk) is about to make Joey Collins (Stuart Whitman) an offer he cannot refuse. Click for a larger view.]

The Schemer isn’t the only hoodlum who keeps his accounts in a six-ring pocket notebook. Killer-for-hire Abe Reles does the same. Murder, Inc. (dir. Burt Balaban and Stuart Rosenberg, 1960) is a crime story with a split personality, dwelling on Falk’s Reles (a combination of Brando and Cagney) before shifting to a faux-documentary police procedural with voiceover. As much as I like that narrative style, I wish they’d stayed with Reles: Falk’s performance is brilliant and scary.

[Click for a larger view. See the name Joey to the left of the paper clip?]

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 : T-Men : Union Station

Letters

Please, put on a hat and step into my time-travel machine. And men, please remove your hats once inside:

Dear Ella,

Bert and I had such a good time at your card party last month that we want to play host and hostess this time. Could you and Wayne come over Monday evening, December the second, around eight-thirty? We’ll play either Bridge or Canasta, whichever you prefer. The Finnegans and the Nortons will be here, too. You know them, I believe, and they are all excellent card players.

The game and the evening would not be complete without you and Wayne. Please say you’ll come.

                                           Sincerely,
                                               Sue

*

Dear Sue,

Wayne and I both appreciate your attractive invitation to play cards at your home on December second. We can’t think of a pleasanter way to spend an evening, particularly as we are Canasta enthusiasts at the moment. Unfortunately, it will be impossible for us to be there with you. My Aunt Harriet in Illinois has asked us to visit her for a week, beginning December first. I haven’t seen her in years, and we have already accepted her invitation. Bill is taking part of his vacation at this time, and he is really looking forward to a pleasant rest and change.

We both regret that we can’t accept, and we do appreciate your thinking of us. Perhaps after we return, you’ll ask us again.

                                           Cordially,
                                               Ella

From Alfred Stuart Myers, Letters for All Occasions (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1952). A library book-sale find.

The American Time Use Survey shows the fate of correspondence in the early twenty-first century. The above graph for the population as a whole (2005–2009) shows a line that’s virtually flat. The graph for people seventy-five and older shows a barely visible rise, which makes me think that “correspondence” here must mean paper-based communication, exclusive of e-mail.

How far in advance of “December the second, around eight-thirty” would the imaginary Ella and Sue have been writing? And did they always write out the date and time? Their letters, not even sixty years old, are truly from another world, the world of Gracious Living. Why pick up the telephone when you can take the time to write?

Related reading
All letters posts (via Pinboard)

Frank Driggs (1930–2011)

Frank Driggs, record producer and collector of jazz photographs, has died:

He trafficked in photographs from other genres too, like rock and country, because the market would bear them even if he personally could not. Visiting Mr. Driggs for a 2005 profile, a writer for Smithsonian magazine noted that in one cabinet Billy Strayhorn, the composer of “Lush Life” and “Take the A Train,” sat in front of Barbra Streisand.

“As well he should,” Mr. Driggs muttered in reply.

From September 2005, here’s the Smithsonian piece: Jazz Man.

A fix for Blogger search problems

If you’ve ever been flusterated by Blogger’s oft-broken search box (in the navigation bar, top left of this page), here are two ways around the problem.

With someone else’s blog, do a Google site search. Open Google, type site: followed by the URL (minus http://), and add keywords.

With your blog, add a search box. The simplest and best one I’ve found is by Darren Hoyt: Build a Simpler Google Search Form. The code for the Orange Crate Art search box (in the sidebar, right) looks like this:

I’ve made two changes to Darren’s code, adding target="_blank" to open search results in a new tab or window, and changing value="Google search " to value="Go ". At last, a working search box. Go, man, go.

Thanks, Darren, for sharing your work.

[September 27, 2012: Darren’s instructions have disappeared from the Internets. I’m glad I saved them here.]

Lost James M. Cain novel

The Cocktail Waitress, an unpublished novel by James M. Cain, will be published next fall by Hard Case Crime.

[Ours is a Cain-friendly household.]

Word of the day: omnibus

From Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day, it’s omnibus:

PRONUNCIATION:
(OM-ni-bus)

MEANING:
noun: 1. A volume reprinting several works by one author or works on one theme. 2. A public vehicle designed to carry a large number of people.
adjective: Including or dealing with many things at once.

ETYMOLOGY:
From French, from Latin omnibus (for all). Ultimately from the Indo-European root op- (to work, produce) that is also the ancestor of words such as opera, opulent, optimum, maneuver, manure, operose and inure. Earliest documented use: 1829.

Omnibus was the name of a weekly television show that ran from 1953 to 1961. The description at the Museum of Broadcasting makes me want to go out and buy what’s available of Omnibus on DVD. Here’s one brief sample from YouTube, with Leonard Bernstein making a blues chorus from two lines of Macbeth.

Boo

I tuned into the Republican presidential candidates’ debate last night just in time to hear audience members boo Stephen Hill, a gay soldier serving in Iraq, who asked whether the candidates intend “to circumvent the progress that’s been made for gay and lesbian soldiers.” Then I heard Rick Santorum’s incoherent response, which ended in a promise to reinstate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The audience cheered. And that was enough viewing for one night. You can see for yourself at YouTube.