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David Rakoff (1964–2012) This American Life has posted video of “Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather.”

VDP on Discover America

“Then all the Trinidadians in LA saw the goat peering out of the trunk of the car just before the barbecue. It was outside the box, and so is this record”: Van Dyke Parks, in a short film by Richard Parks, Van Dyke Parks on Discover America.

Discover America is a 1972 VDP album of calypso and calypso-influenced songs, recently re-released on the Bella Union label.

Also by Richard Parks
Van Dyke Parks on Song Cycle

ca-kyvi-wa-sa

Good advice from David Sparks for keeping things secure online: Good Luck Social Engineering My Security Question Answers.

The Elements of Style, illustrated

[Click for larger views and stiffer fines.]

Maira Kalman isn’t the only artist to have illustrated The Elements of Style. These covers are from a copy of the 1920 Harcourt, Brace trade edition, now in the Cornell University Library. A digitized version is available from the Internet Archive. I’m joking about fines: a better explanation might be that with a scarce book, almost any used copy is welcome. I’d like to know what the artist wrote in the upper-right corner. My best guess for the leftmost writing above the desk: Strunk. The words that follow are clear: AND HOW!

Strange: a copy of the 1920 edition now for sale has a drawing of a dolphin on its cover.

Related reading
All Elements of Style posts (via Pinboard)

David Rakoff (1964–2012)

The New York Times reports that the writer David Rakoff has died. He was a frequent contributor to This American Life. I’m listening again to “Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather,” which aired in May. It’s unforgettable.

August 11: This American Life has posted the video of “Stiff as Board, Light as a Feather” to YouTube. Thank you, TAL.

The sound of one door slamming

Seven-year-old Seymour Glass writing about his five-year-old brother Buddy:

The very first and last thing you must remember about this small, haunting chap is that he will be in a terrible rush all his life to get the door nicely slammed behind him in any room where there is a striking and handsome supply of good, sharp pencils and plenty of paper.

J. D. Salinger, “Hapworth 16, 1924” (1965).

[This post is for the pencil lovers among us.]

Welcome, millionth visitor

Scroll down any post or page on Orange Crate Art and you’ll see in the sidebar a silly slogan and an odometer. The odometer is of course a counter, from StatCounter, a service I highly recommend.

As you can see, Orange Crate Art just had its millionth visitor. Millionth feels odd, spoken or typed. In the Major Leagues of the Internets, a million visits is all in a few days’ work. Here in Double-A, it’s a big deal. I’ve been watching and waiting, having added a seventh digit to my counter earlier this week. Millionth is an approximation: I didn’t begin using a counter until Orange Crate Art was five months old. Some visits are not logged; others, logged, have been mine, from computers not my own. I think it all evens out.

The millionth visitor was a reader from Cincinnati, Ohio, who’s been here, I believe, on several occasions, this time to the most recent post, on J. D. Salinger and The Elements of Style.

Thanks, everyone, for reading.

Glass, Salinger, Strunk, White

What follows is speculation:

In “Hapworth 16, 1924” (1965), J. D. Salinger’s last published work of fiction, seven-year-old Seymour Glass, writing a letter to his parents and three of his siblings from summer camp, acknowledges — at length — that he needs to improve his writing:

While bearing in mind that my loss of you is very acute today, hardly bearable in the last analysis, I am also snatching this stunning opportunity to use my new and entirely trivial mastery of written construction and decent sentence formation as explained and slightly enriched upon in that small book, alternately priceless and sheer crap, which you saw me poring over to excess during the difficult days prior to our departure for this place. Though this is quite a terrible bore for you, dear Bessie and Les, superb or suitable construction of sentences holds some passing, amusing importance for a young fool like myself! It would be quite a relief to rid my system of fustian this year. It is in danger of destroying my possible future as a young poet, private scholar, and unaffected person.

*

[I]t is all too easy for a boy of my dubious age and experience to fall easy prey to fustian, poor taste, and unwanted spurts of showing off.

*

I am personally very hopeful that great layers of unnatural, affected, stilted fustian and rotten, disagreeable words will drop off my young body like flies during the crucial period to come! It is worth every effort, my future sentence construction quite hanging in the balance!

That conspicuous reference to “that small book, alternately priceless and sheer crap”: could it be meant to suggest The Elements of Style? Harcourt, Brace brought out a trade edition of William Strunk’s book in 1920, just fifty-two pages long. By 1965, The Elements was well known as “the little book.” Seymour’s habits of writing are, as the above passage shows, far from Strunkian. But the target of playful mockery here might more likely be “Strunk and White,” E. B. White’s 1959 revision of The Elements of Style. It’s the 1959 text that condemns Seymour’s pet phrase “in the last analysis” (fourteen appearances in “Hapworth”) as “a bankrupt expression.” And it’s the 1959 text that cautions against over-relying on adjectives and adverbs. Seymour is crazy about adjectives, slightly less so about adverbs, and they make for delightful, hilarious, improbable sentences:

A decent, utterly frank criterion is always of splendid, temporary use to a young person.

*

I am freely saddling you, one and all, parent and child, with a very long, boring letter, quite filled to the brim with my stilted flow of words and thoughts.

*

Oh, my God, you are a risible, amusing kid!

But Seymour’s doing his best to — like the man says — omit needless words:

If the rest of my letter seems a little too brisk and impersonal, please excuse it; I am going to devote the remainder of the letter to economy of words and phraseology, quite my weakest point in written construction. If I sound quite cold and brisk, remember it is for my own practice and that I am not feeling cold and brisk where you, parent and child alike, are concerned; far from it!

That a work of fiction in the form of a transcription of a 1924 letter seems to make veiled reference to a 1959 publication — well, that would hardly be the most extraordinary thing about “Hapworth 16, 1924.” That a work of such exuberance and strangeness met with such a cold and brisk reception baffles and saddens me. Personally, I’m still hopeful that this work and other, hitherto unpublished Salinger works will, in the last analysis, appear in book form in the not distant future.

Related reading
All Salinger posts (via Pinboard)
All Strunk and White posts (via Pinboard)

[It’s the 1959 text that let the common reader know the phrase “the little book”: in his introduction, White mentions it as Strunk’s way of referring to The Elements. New Yorker subscribers can find “Hapworth 16, 1924” in the June 19, 1965 issue in the online archive.]

Word of the day: nemophilous

The Oxford English Dictionary has it:

nemophilous, adj.

Etymology: < ancient Greek νέμος wooded pasture, glade (see NEMOPHILA n.) + -PHILOUS comb. form.

rare.

Fond of or frequenting woods.

The combining form -philous creates “adjectives with the sense ‘having an affinity for or thriving in (a particular kind of habitat or environment).’”

I encountered nemophilous in “Hapworth 16, 1924” (1965), J. D. Salinger’s last published fiction, which takes the form of a letter from seven-year-old Seymour Glass, away at summer camp with his younger brother Buddy, to his parents and other siblings: “To my joy and sheer wonder, your son Buddy has turned out to be utterly and thrillingly nemophilous!”

Related reading
Argyrol : Charlotte russe : Musterole : Sal Hepatica : Stopette

When comic strips do technology

[Mark Trail, August 8, 2012.]

It doesn’t always work out.

Related reading
Earlier Mark Trail posts