Music Man Murray

Streaming at NPR: Music Man Murray, a 2011 film by Richard Parks. Murray is eighty-eight-year-old Murray Gershenz, seeking a buyer for the contents of his Los Angeles record store. With music by Van Dyke Parks.

[It’s Record Store Day.]

Should I check e-mail?

A flow chart by Wendy McNaughton (via Coudal).

“It isn’t creative at all!”

Elizabeth Bishop, from a letter to anthologist John Frederick Nims, written on the last day of her life, October 6, 1979:

You can see what a nasty teacher I must be — but I do think students get lazier and lazier & expect to have everything done for them. (I suggested buying a small paper-back and almost the whole class whines “Where can I find it?”) My best example of this sort of thing is what one rather bright Harvard honors student told me. She told her room-mate or a friend — who had obviously taken my verse-writing course — that she was doing her paper with me and the friend said “Oh don’t work with her! It’s awful! She wants you to look words up in the dictionary! It isn’t creative at all!” In other words, it is better not to know what you’re writing or reading.

From Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008).

Related posts
Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar
Lines from Elizabeth Bishop

Move that prepositional phrase

From the Huffington Post:

See also: Godwin’s law.

[Thanks, Elaine.]

Mitt/Mark Romney/Trail, learning from experience

[Mark Trail, April 19, 2012.]

Mitt/Mark Romney/Trail is learning from experience. On his way to pick up Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, Mitt/Mark travels with his dog inside his vehicle, at least while being photographed, or drawn.

[Yes, one-percenter Mitt Romney and ninety-nine-percenter Mark Trail are the same person. There are no classes in America. No seat belts either.]

Dick Clark (1929–2012)

[“TV deejay Dick Clark, standing in the middle of his teenage fans who are swirling around him on the studio dance floor during rock ’n’ roll number on his weekly show American Bandstand.” Photograph by Paul Schutzer. Philadelphia, December 12, 1958. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Steve Soboroff’s typewriters

Steve Soboroff likes typewriters. And there’s a slide show.

LAX English

I found this jotting in a notebook, words that I heard or read at LAX last fall: “Please maintain visual contact with your personal property at all times.”

Simpler: “Watch your bags — always.”

From eleven words to four, from nineteen syllables to five. Is anything missing?

[If I saw a sign with these words, I’d have photographed it, no doubt. So I must have heard an announcement on the PA system.]

Recipes I stopped reading

<read>

3/4 cup reduced fat peanut butter
1 cup light corn syrup

</read>

Previously on Orange Crate Art
Another recipe I stopped reading

[This one’s from a box of Grape-Nuts.]

Gmail is down

Gmail appears to be down for many. Down for Everyone or Just Me says that it’s not just me. Google’s past-hour results for gmail suggest a widespread problem. Trying to sign into an account, failing, and clicking on Gmail’s link to Show Detailed Technical Info results in the following detailed technical info:

You can now type numeric code 93 into the search engine of your choice and find that many others are asking what “Numeric Code: 93” means. I think what it means is that Gmail, for now, is down.

12:40 p.m.: It’s back, at least for me.