Timothy Barrett, papermaker

At the New York Times, Mark Levine profiles Timothy Barrett, papermaker:

Barrett, who is 61, has dedicated his life to unlocking the mysteries of paper, which he regards as both the elemental stuff of civilization and an endangered species in digital culture. . . . “Sometimes I worry about what a weird thing it is to be preoccupied with paper when there’s so much trouble in the world,” Barrett told me, “but then I think of how our whole culture is knitted together by paper, and it makes a kind of sense.”

Bonus: there’s a slideshow.

Kay Davis (1920–2012)

Kathryn McDonald sang as Kay Davis with the Duke Ellington Orchestra from 1944 to 1950:

Kay Davis was an honor student of Northwestern University, where she studied opera and majored in music. She had perfect pitch, could sight-read, and had all the gifts, so we decided to use her voice as an instrument. . . . I shall never forget her first Carnegie Hall appearance in January 1946. Subtitled “A Blue Fog You Can Almost See Through,” “Transblucency” was a last-minute kind of composition, and the two featured musicians (Jimmy Hamilton on clarinet and Lawrence Brown on trombone) had to have music stands at the mike, because it had been completed too late for them to memorize. So we put Kay’s part on a music stand at the mike, just like those of the musicians, and the performance was a smash.

Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973).

Here from 1946 is “Transblucency.” And here from 2009 is a short film about Kay Davis, The Voice of the Ellington Orchestra. Are Herb Jeffries and Maria Cole (Marie Ellington) now the last links to the 1940s Ellington orchestra?

Related reading
Soprano was one of last links to Duke Ellington (Chicago Sun-Times)

[For any singers out there: yes, Ellington should have written instrumentalists, not musicians.]

Betty Flowers: madman, architect, carpenter, judge

Betty S. Flowers says that one who writes must be, in turn, madman, architect, carpenter, and judge. I’ve found this four-part metaphor tremendously useful in helping students to see the different kinds of work that good writing requires.

A related post
Granularity (“one thing at a time”)

Margaret Edson on writing

From a New York Times article on playwright and teacher Margaret Edson, author of Wit:

Writing itself . . . is something to which she is deeply committed, and she usually ends each class quietly, with a writing assignment. “Sitting by yourself, forcing the swirl of thoughts into a linear, systematic journey forward — it makes you smarter,” she said. “It’s like a pastry bag, literacy is. It presses you into one clear line.”

Don’t miss Edson’s 2008 Smith College commencement address: “I love the classroom. I loved it as a student, and I love it as a teacher.” Here’s a transcript if you’re pressed for time.

OSS 117: Lost in Rio

[Click for a larger, more 1967ish view.]

Michel Hazanavicius’s OSS 117: Rio ne répond plus [OSS 117: Lost in Rio] (2009) is the sequel to OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions [OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies] (2006). Here OSS 117 (Jean Dujardin) travels to Rio to deliver payment to the escaped Nazi Von Zimmel (Rüdiger Vogler) in exchange for a list of 50,000 French collaborators. (Talk about your politically incorrect plot premise.) Once in Rio, 117 ends up helping Mossad agent Dolorès Koulechov (Louise Monot) track Von Zimmel down. The Dujardin-Monot partnership lacks the comic zest of the Dujardin-Bérénice Bejo partnership in Nest of Spies, and some of the jokes we’ve seen before. But there are wonderful moments: a drug-fueled orgy (it’s 1967), a fight in a chicken coop, a costume party with Dujardin as Robin Hood (or is it Dujardin as Errol Flynn as Robin Hood?). And there are delightful over-the-top homages to North by Northwest and Vertigo. Not as funny as Lost in Rio, but very funny.

A related post
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

[Above, OSS 117 and CIA agent Bill Trumendous (Ken Samuels).]

Chris Matthews disappoints

Every time I think I should be more generous toward Chris Matthews, he disappoints me anew. The other day, after showing a clip of Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo in The Artist (2011, dir. Michel Hazanavicius), Matthews remarked, “I don’t know where they found those guys.” Interviewee James Cromwell, who appears in the film, was too tactful to respond. But it couldn’t have been too difficult for Hazanavicius to find those guys. Dujardin and Bejo both have long careers in film. Both have worked with Hazanavicius before. And Bejo and Hazanavicius are married.

Is it all right not to know these things? Sure. But when you’re on television, you should try to know what you’re talking about, or at least know what not to talk about.

Related posts
The Artist (and typography) (“ ” v. " ")
Chris Matthews explains it all for you
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (Bejo, Dujardin, Hazanavicius)

Doyald Young, Logotype Designer

From Doyald Young, Logotype Designer:

“To learn to draw a letter well takes a lot of time. I’ve been drawing letters since 1948, and I’m still learning how to draw.”

Dictionaries, pencils, pencil sharpeners: this beautifully made film has it (them) all.

Related reading
Doyald Young (his website)
Doyald Young, 84, Designer of Typefaces, Dies (New York Times)

Bill Withers on wanting to be cool

From the documentary Still Bill (2009, dir. Damani Baker and Alex Vlack), Bill Withers addressing an audience of young and younger people:

“When you’re a kid, you want to be cool, and you want to be cool with the cool people. And that doesn’t always happen. So if you can learn to value the people who value you —”

Still Bill answers the question “Whatever became of Bill Withers?” and reveals a man who is kind, patient, and endlessly wise. Especially when he’s schooling Tavis Smiley and Cornel West on the meaning of sell out: kind, patient, and wise. One of the best scenes is stuck in the DVD extras: Withers in conversation with Jim Brown, Bernie Casey and Bill Russell. Not to be missed.

Related posts
Ben Folds on the tyranny of cool
Bill Withers and John Hammond

Valentine’s Day

[“Whelan’s Drug Store, 44th Street and Eighth Avenue, Manhattan.” Photograph by Berenice Abbott. February 7, 1936. From the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Click for a larger view. Happy Valentine’s Day.]

Selling the Iliad

On the back cover of the new University of Chicago Press edition of Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 translation of Homer’s Iliad, there’s an appraisal from Robert Fitzgerald:

The feat is so decisive that it is reasonable to foresee a century or so in which nobody will try again to put the Iliad in English verse.

Yes, Fitzgerald wrote that sentence, in “Heroic Poems in English,” a review of Lattimore’s translation published in the Autumn 1952 issue of the Kenyon Review. Sometime after writing that sentence, Fitzgerald translated the Iliad (1974). His Odyssey (1961) though is far better known.

I’ll admit: if I were tasked with selling the Iliad, I’d like to quote great reviews too. But quoting a nearly sixty-year-old undated sentence on the likely longevity of a translation, a sentence whose writer went on to make his own translation of the poem, seems, well, odd.

Related posts (Homer in translation)
“Kchaou!”
Translations, mules, briars
Translators at work and play
Whose Homer?

[I’m unable to find a date for this edition’s other jacket quotation, from Peter Green, writing in The New Republic: “Perhaps closer to Homer in every way than any other version made in English.” Which versions did Green have in mind?]