[“American children of Japanese, German and Italian heritage pledging allegiance to the flag.” Photograph by Dorothea Lange. California, April 20, 1942. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]
Saying no to xenophobia is the American way, or ought to be, always. Happy Fourth of July.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
The Fourth of July
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Andy Griffith (1926–2012)
Sad news in the Chicago Tribune:
Actor Andy Griffith, whose portrayal of a small-town sheriff made The Andy Griffith Show one of American television’s most enduring shows, has died at his North Carolina home, television station WITN reported on Tuesday.Another reason to remember Andy Griffith: his performance as Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957).
A pipe with a cigar in it
Navigating the parking lot of my local multinational retail corporation, I noticed a man behind the wheel of a station wagon. He was smoking a pipe with a cigar in it. The bowl of his pipe held perhaps three or four inches of cigar.
Men do smoke in this manner. Women too. Card Cow has proof that even roosters enjoy a cigar in a pipe. The why though puzzles me. Can anyone suggest an answer?
[I stopped smoking cigarettes almost twenty-three years ago. But sometimes, still, je veux fumer.]
Monday, July 2, 2012
Proust in the NYT crossword
Marcel Proust makes an anagrammatic appearance in today’s New York Times crossword. The clue for 25-Across: “French writer’s state of drunkenness.” The answer: PROUSTSSTUPOR. The maker of today’s puzzle is ninety-eight-year-old Bernice Gordon, who has been making crosswords for sixty years.
Related reading
All Proust posts (via Pinboard)
Nancy meets Alfred Hitchcock
Caution: If you’ve never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, you may want to skip this post.
Behold Nancy Ritz and Sluggo Smith, in their screen tests for the roles of Madeleine Elster and John “Scottie” Ferguson, roles that went to Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart. Nancy’s Madeleine, possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes, is about to speak the haunting line “Somewhere in here I was born, and there I died.”
[Click for a larger view of Novak, Stewart, and a cross-section of a redwood.]
More haunting still is the Ritz and Smith version of Vertigo’s recognition scene. In the blue-green light of the Hotel Empire’s neon sign, Scottie sees Judy Barton transformed at last into the now-dead Madeleine.
Vertigo is my favorite film. I think it can take a joke.
[Click for larger views.]
Other Nancy posts
Charlotte russe
The greatest Nancy panel?
Nancy is here
Nancy meets Stanley Kubrick (screen test for The Shining)
[Nancy panels by Ernie Bushmiller, March 13 and March 30, 1945, from Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943–1945 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012). I’ve removed speech balloons from the second panel. Blue-green light courtesy of the Hotel Empire.]
Friday, June 29, 2012
Ice-cream cones
But look: the inside cone too is melting. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
The temperature here in east-central Illinois: 102 °F. The heat index: 115 °F.
Related reading
Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (Poets.org)
Neatening up
[Before and after.]
What I’m about to suggest might be common knowledge, but perhaps not. The paint-can tool in an image editor offers an easy way to neaten up a scan from Google Books (or from anywhere). Choose a color (perhaps with an eyedropper tool) and pour. Digital artifacts, begone.
The image above is from Google Books, an illustration of the Robinson Reminder pocket notebook. I used the paint-can tool in a more elaborate way last week after scanning a page from Hart’s Guide to New York City. When I pressed hard to get the text on a verso page, chunks of the text from the recto page came through. So I aimed and poured, and poured again and again.
[I like Seashore, a free image-editor for OS X.]
Quick 50 Writing Tools
From Roy Peter Clark and The Poynter Institute: Quick 50 Writing Tools, a bare-bones presentation of the content of Clark’s book Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (2008).
Some of the advice in this PDF (“Limit self-criticism in early drafts”) might be helpful as is. Some (“Climb up and down the ladder of abstraction”) might remain cryptic without further explanation. But like they say, it’s a start. And there is, after all, a book.
[“Like they say”: for me this phrase always recalls the poet Robert Creeley. You can find it three times for instance in this Paris Review interview.]
NYPL, a series of tubes
The New York Public Library is a series of tubes, sort of (via Pete Lit).
Related reading
Series of tubes (Wikipedia)
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