Parker and Barab tonight in NYC

If you’re in New York City or environs: there’s a concert tonight at Symphony Space with the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, “The American Scene.” Among the works to be performed: Songs of Perfect Propriety, words by Dorothy Parker, music by Seymour Barab.

Elaine Fine is hoping that someone who attends this performance will write about it. If you have no platform of your own from which to do so, follow this link to Elaine’s post and leave your thoughts in the form of a comment.

June 29: There’s a review in the New York Times.

[Orange Crate Art is a Seymour-and-Margie-Barab-friendly site.]

How to improve writing (no. 38)

I’ve been reading cereal boxes at breakfast since childhood. But it’s only in recent years that I’ve started to edit while eating. Consider this sentence, from a list of “simple things to feel good each day” on a box of Post Shredded Wheat:¹

Show thanks to your local neighborhood by picking up one piece of trash every day.

This sentence invites small- and large-scale rethinking. Small-scale:

Show thanks to your local neighborhood by picking up one piece of trash every day.

But there’s a larger problem: this recommendation makes little sense. If there’s lots of trash to be had, picking up one piece per day hardly seems like an expression of gratitude. If anything, the gesture seems a bit passive-aggressive. Imagine this sort of effort in a different context:

Show thanks to your local spouse by picking up one piece of clothing from the pile on the floor every day.

I think the local spouse would feel that she is being baited.

Here’s a more helpful recommendation:

Care for your neighborhood by picking up trash.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to remove some items from a nearby floor — books, not clothes.

¹ Yes, “simple things to do to feel good each day” makes better sense. But here too there’s a larger problem, because the list includes things to do only occasionally — babysitting a friend’s children, for instance.

[This post is no. 38 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. Post is a cereal offender when it comes to lousy writing.]

Related reading

All How to improve writing posts

Pocket notebook sighting

[Click for a larger view.]

Anthony Mann’s film Railroaded! (1947) is an Orange Crate Art two-fer, as it features both a pocket notebook and a telephone exchange name. The notebook belongs to police sergeant Mickey Ferguson (Hugh Beaumont). Dig the perforations! A pocket looseleaf-notebook plays an important role in Mann’s T-Men (1947).

If it’s difficult to make out: the word stamped into the leather of this high-class item, far left, is CARDS.

June 27: In the comments, Adair has identified this notebook as a Robinson Reminder. Here’s a picture of one that sold at Etsy.

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 : Murder, Inc. : 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

[Yes, there are all kinds of ways to watch movies.]

Telephone exchange names on screen: GLadstone

Railroaded! (dir. Anthony Mann, 1947) is a perfect B-movie: nasty, brutish, and short. The cast includes Hugh Beaumont (later of Leave It to Beaver), John Ireland (Red River), and Jane Randolph (Cat People). GLadstone was indeed a Los Angeles telephone exchange. And Anthony Mann made some modestly terrific thrillers.


[Click for a larger view.]

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

Cities and advertising

The New York Times reports on cities raising money by selling advertising space on fire trucks, police cars, rescue helicopters, and school buses. And elsewhere:

KFC became a pioneer in this kind of unconventional ad placement earlier in the downturn, when it temporarily plastered its logo on manhole covers and fire hydrants in several cities in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee after paying to fill potholes and replace hydrants.

Life imitates David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: in the novel’s post-millennial world of Subsidized Time, the United States government makes up for lost revenue by offering corporate bidders the naming rights for years. Most of the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

Charlotte russe

[Nancy, May 22, 1944.]

Aunt Fritzi just announced some surprise visitors: Nancy’s friends Charlotte and Ruth. Nancy’s disappointment is understandable.

Charlotte russe is a delightful food of the dowdy world, or at least the New York City version of the dowdy world. I consumed charlotte russes in my Brooklyn childhood, buying them through the window of a candy store at the northeast corner of 44th Street and 13th Avenue. The charlotte russe was a simple and satisfying food: yellow cake, whipped cream, and a maraschino cherry, held in a white cardboard cylinder. Pushing the cylinder’s cardboard bottom upward allowed easier access to the cake as the cream disappeared. I cannot recall whether a utensil came into play.

Dictionaries seem largely in the dark about the New York charlotte russe:

The American Heritage Dictionary: “a cold dessert of Bavarian cream set in a mold lined with ladyfingers.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary: “a charlotte made with sponge cake or ladyfingers and a whipped-cream or custard-gelatin filling.”

The New Oxford American Dictionary: “a dessert consisting of custard enclosed in sponge cake or a casing of ladyfingers.”

The Oxford English Dictionary: “a dish composed of custard enclosed in a kind of sponge-cake.”

Er, no. But the Random House Dictionary has charlotte russes both fancy and plain: “a dessert made by lining a mold with sponge cake or ladyfingers and filling it with Bavarian cream” and “a simpler version of this, consisting of a small piece of sponge cake topped with whipped cream and a candied cherry.” I remember cake-cake, not spongecake. I’ve never been a big fan of spongecake.

The charlotte russe makes an appearance in at least two great stories of life in New York. From Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943):

There was a bakery store to one side of it [a pawnshop] which sold beautiful charlotte russes with with red candied cherries on their whipped cream tops for those who were rich enough to buy.

And from J. D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction (1959), narrator Buddy Glass writing about his sister Boo Boo:

Boo Boo went through a stage — admirably short, in her case, I must say — when she “died” at least twice daily over the gaffes, the faux pas, of adults in general. At the height of this period, a favorite history teacher who came into class after lunch with a dot of charlotte russe on her cheek was quite sufficient cause for Boo Boo to wither and die at her desk.

For more on the past and present of New York’s charlotte russe, I recommend Lost Foods of New York City: Charlotte Russe Link’s gone. Try New York Charlotte Russe (Atlas Obscura). AO reports that Holtermann’s Bakery, on Staten Island, still makes charlotte russe.

[The Nancy panel appears in Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943–1945 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012). Do you remember when candystores and newsstands did streetside business through a window?]

The grizzly, friend to man

[Mark Trail, June 23, 2012.]

There’s probably a Mitt Romney joke in here somewhere — Sarah Palin, “mama grizzly,” all that — but I’ve chosen to post this panel for the sheer lunacy of outdoorsman Mark Trail’s thought process. Kids, don’t try this at home, or in someone else’s home.

Fred Astaire

[“Dancer Fred Astaire clad in top hat, tails & spats vaulting off his cane as he does a climatic jump in ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ number for the movie Blue Skies.” Photograph by Bob Landry. November 29, 1945. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Fred might have wished for a private image different from his public one but he couldn’t quite pull it off. The adjectives applied to him were true. He was a good fellow — never a guy. F. A. bowed out at the right time. But I shall miss him terribly. Me and the world.

Richard McKenzie, son-in-law to Astaire, quoted in Kathleen Riley, The Astaires: Fred & Adele (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Fred Astaire died on June 22, 1987, twenty-five years ago today.

Related posts
Fred Astaire on What’s My Line?
John Ashbery and Fred Astaire on The Mike Douglas Show

Geoffrey Pullum on nouns

Linguist Geoffrey Pullum on the inadequacy of traditional definitions of a noun:

It is useless to look for a common ontological nature in airspeeds, apples, and absences, or organizations, orchids, and orgasms. To give a definition that permits decisions as to whether a given English word is a noun or not, you have to consider morphological and syntactic facts.

I have on several occasions taken issue with what I see as Pullum’s distortions and exaggerations regarding The Elements of Style. Here though I think that Pullum is right. He and I agree about something after all.

[This post is for my son Ben, who has grammar and its problems on his mind.]

French bookstores

The New York Times reports that bookstores in France are flourishing. Or at least French-language bookstores in France: the largest English-language bookstore in Paris is folding.

[Can you imagine the United States government subsidizing bookstores? Me neither.]