“Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory”

This American Life has retracted its story “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” The short explanation: “many of Mike Daisey’s experiences in China were fabricated.” Or in the active voice: he lied.

CAUTION: BREAKDANCE ZONE

If I were Mitt Romney

If I were Mitt Romney, I’d announce a listening tour:

“You know, everyone’s talking as if these primaries and caucuses are about me, and Rick, and Newt, and Ron. But they’re not about any of us. They’re about you, about your hopes and dreams. And I want to prove that to you, not by getting up here and talking, not by making speeches, but by listening to what you have to say,” &c.

What might follow: Romney in conversation with so-called ordinary people, listening, commiserating, explaining how his policies would make things different. He could use Phil Dunphy’s line (from Modern Family): “I know, that’s so frustrating.”

Would it work? The picture of the rich man humbling himself in the company of the common folk might move some voters in Romney’s direction. But he’d have to stay on task (“I know, that’s so frustrating”) and not remind voters that he too is unemployed.

Other Mitt Romney posts
Mitt Romney and Mark Trail
Mitt Romney at Bain
Mitt Romney: the soul of a poet

[“As if these primaries and caucuses are”: my script avoids the subjunctive, which is not for red-blooded Americans. “Listening tour” for me means Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, but the term seems to be everywhere: Google returns over a million results. I corrected Phil Dunphy’s line after checking the episode “Two Monkeys and a Panda.”]

Domestic comedy

Waiting in line at our friendly neighborhood multinational retailer, we wondered about the doings in the nail salon beyond the registers:

“Do they wash them first?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never set foot in one of those places.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts

Avoiding CAPTCHA

Blogger’s updated, more difficult word-verification gizmos (aka CAPTCHAs) are tedious at best. At worst, they’re unreadable. As The Real Blogger Status points out, enlarging with Command-+ or Control-+ can make the CAPTCHAs more readable. But a Blogger user might do the reader a greater courtesy by turning off word-verification. That’s now possible only from the old Blogger interface: go to Dashboard, Settings, Comments, and scroll down to “Show word verification for comments?”

Just saying no might lead to an influx of automated spam comments. I turned off word-verification yesterday and have seen more spam comments in a day than in the past two or three years. But I moderate comments, so the spam never makes it to my posts. If deleting the junk saves a reader from having to work out something like the enigma below, I’m happy to do it. If the spam becomes unmanageable, I’ll no longer be able to avoid CAPTCHA.

[Say what‽]

‽

The interrobang turns fifty.

A Kerouac notebook page

[Click for a larger view.]

I was startled yesterday to see the name of our friend Seymour Barab in a post at Ordinary Finds for Jack Kerouac’s ninetieth birthday. My transcription of this 1953 (?) Kerouac notebook page, which analyzes Allen Ginsberg:

Ginsberg — intelligent enuf, interested in the outward appearance & pose of great things, intelligent enuf to know where to find them, but once there he acts like Jerry Newman, the photographer anxious to be photographed photographing —— Ginsberg wants to run his hand up the backs of people, for this he gives and seldom takes — He is also a mental screwball

*(Tape recorder anxious to be tape recorded tape recording) (like Seymour Barab anxious to have his name in larger letters than Robert Louis Stevenson, like Steinberg & Verlaine Rimbaud Baudelaire

I think I’ve put together the connections:

1. Jerry Newman was a friend of Kerouac’s, a Columbia University student and recording engineer. (“The photographer anxious to be photographed” seems to be a metaphor, followed by the more appropriate metonymy, “tape recorder anxious to be tape recorded.”) I recognized Newman’s name because of his recordings of jazz in Harlem clubs: Charlie Christian, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Art Tatum, among other musicians. Newman recorded Kerouac too.

2. Newman founded two record labels, Esoteric and Counterpoint. Russell Oberlin’s recording of Seymour Barab’s settings of poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses was released on Counterpoint in 1953. (It’s still available from Essential Media Group.)

3. Kerouac seems not to have understood that a composer often gets the more prominent credit when setting texts to music.

4. I can make nothing of “Steinberg & Verlaine Rimbaud Baudelaire.” Did Saul Steinberg do a cover for a collection of their work? If so, I haven’t found it. [6:39 p.m.: Bent from Ordinary Finds offers the likely explanation in the comments: Steinberg’s drawings of pages from Rimbaud’s lost diary.]

5. Speaking of artists: the cover for A Child’s Garden of Verses is the work of William Steig. He and Seymour were friends and neighbors.

Elaine and I have learned so much from Seymour Barab and Margie King Barab. As Elaine puts it, Seymour and Margie are our “favorite inhabitants of the Upper East Side.” How fortunate we are to have their friendship. Seymour by the way never met Kerouac or Ginsberg, and he recalls no discussion of the billing on the album cover.

A related post
Jack Kerouac’s last typewriter

[I mark very few birthdays on Orange Crate Art: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King Jr., Van Dyke Parks, Marcel Proust — that’s all. Elaine took note of Seymour’s ninety-first birthday earlier this year.]

Re: Curator’s Code

Marco Arment’s “I’m not a ‘curator’” offers an excellent analysis of Maria Popova’s Curator’s Code, a project that I learned about from a New York Times article yesterday. Curator’s Code proposes that those who write online use two symbols to acknowledge online sources: ᔥ for via, “a link of direct discovery,” and ↬ for hat tip, “a link of indirect discovery, story lead, or inspiration.” Arment suggests that the ethics of attribution online are not best addressed by using symbols to acknowledge sources:

The proper place for ethics and codes is in ensuring that a reasonable number of people go to the source instead of just reading your rehash.

That’s exactly right.

One point to add: The Curator’s Code project seems to me to misunderstand the meaning of via. Here is the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate on via:

1 : by way of
2 : through the medium or agency of; also : by means of

One quotes from, not via: “To be or not to be” is from Hamlet, not via Hamlet. What I think of as via is what Curator’s Code calls hat tip: an acknowledgement that one has found something by means of someone else’s work. The confusion of via and hat tip seems to me a problem with Curator’s Code that can be solved only with new terms. How about from and via?

[I disagree with Marco Arment about hat tips (or what he also thinks of as via): I think it’s appropriate, whenever possible, to acknowledge how one has come across an item of interest. Many an OCA post contains a via. Everything in this post though I found on my own.]

Toddler recites Shakespeare

A two-year-old recites William Shakespeare’s sonnet 18. Even if he drops lines, he deserves at least as many views as a three-year-old reciting a Billy Collins poem.

Update, March 13: Summer’s lease hath all too short a date. The video has been removed from YouTube.

A related post
xkcd: “Compare and Contrast”

[Thanks, Stefan.]

kennethkoch.org

A new website devoted to the work of the poet Kenneth Koch: kennethkoch.org.

If you think Billy Collins is a good poet, read Kenneth Koch. Koch is the real thing. There, I said it.