William Zinsser, listening

“People read with their ears, whether they know it or not”: William Zinsser, now blind, coaches writers by listening to them read their work.

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

From Richard O. Boyer’s three-part profile “The Hot Bach” (New Yorker, July 1, 1944). Ellington is talking to fans on a train and has turned to the subject of food:

“I have special places marked for special dishes,” he said. “In Taunton, Massachusetts, you can get the best chicken stew in the United States. For chow mein with pigeon’s blood, I go to Johnny Cann’s Cathay House in San Francisco. I get my crab cakes at Bolton’s — that’s in San Francisco, too. I know a place in Chicago where you get the best barbecued ribs west of Cleveland and the best shrimp Creole outside New Orleans. There’s a wonderful place in Memphis, too, for barbecued ribs. I get my Chinnook salmon in Portland, Oregon. In Toronto I get duck orange, and the best fried chicken in the world is in Louisville, Kentucky. I get myself a half-dozen chickens and a gallon jar of potato salad, so I can feed the sea gulls. You know, the guys who reach over your shoulder. There’s a place in Chicago, the Southway Hotel, that’s got the best cinnamon rolls and the best filet mignon in the world. Then there’s Ivy Anderson’s chicken shack in Los Angeles, where they have hot biscuits with honey and very fine chicken-liver omelets. In New Orleans there’s gumbo filé. I like it so well that I always take a pail of it out with me when I leave. In New York I send over to the Turf Restaurants at Forty-ninth and Broadway a couple of times a week to get their broiled lamb chops. I guess I’m a little freakish with lamb chops. I prefer to eat them in the dressing room, where I have plenty of room and can really let myself go. In Washington, at Harrison’s, they have devilled crab and Virginia ham. They’re terrific things. On the Ile-de-France, when we went to Europe, they had the best crêpes Suzette in the world and it took a dozen at a time to satisfy me. The Café Royale, in the Hague, has the best hors d’oeuvres in the world — eighty-five different kinds, and it takes a long time to eat some of each. There's a place on West Forty-ninth Street in New York that has wonderful curried food and a wonderful chutney. There’s a place in Paris that has the best octopus soup. And oh, my, the smörgåsbord in Sweden! At Old Orchard Beach, Maine, I got the reputation of eating more hot dogs than any man in America. A Mrs. Wagner there makes a toasted bun that’s the best of its kind in America. She has a toasted bun, then a slice of onion, then a hamburger, then a tomato, then melted cheese, then another hamburger, then a slice of onion, more cheese, more tomato, and then the other side of the button. Her hotdogs have two dogs to a bun. I ate thirty-two one night. She has very fine baked beans. When I eat with Mrs. Wagner, I begin with ham and eggs for an appetizer, then the baked beans, then fried chicken, then a steak — her steaks are two inches thick — and then a dessert of applesauce, ice cream, chocolate cake, and custard, mixed with rich, yellow country cream. I like veal with an egg on it. Monseigneur’s, in London, has very fine mutton. Durgin-Park’s, in Boston, has very fine roast beef. I get the best baked ham, cabbage, and cornbread at a little place near Biloxi. St. Petersburg, Florida, has the best fried fish. It's just a little shack, but they can sure fry fish. I really hurt myself when I go there.”

Duke’s audience seemed awed at his recital, and he looked rather impressed himself. “Gee,” he said admiringly, “I really sent myself on that didn’t I?”

Duke Ellington’s music has been making my life better for more than thirty-five years. For an introduction, I recommend The Great Paris Concert. If you’d like to browse other Ellington posts, they’re listed at Pinboard.

[Boyer’s profile is reprinted in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).]

The irregular restrictive what ?

John McPhee’s “Draft No. 4” (in the April 29 New Yorker) has a passage that puzzled me, about “the irregular restrictive which ” (italics mine), a term that McPhee learned from the New Yorker editor William Shawn, who “explained that under certain unusual and special circumstances the word ‘which’ could be employed at the head of a restrictive clause.” In other words, which can sometimes substitute for that .

Which in fact often substitutes for that ; there is no absolute rule that that divides their use. Many writers, however, prefer to reserve that for restrictive clauses, which for nonrestrictive. The distinction brings a small (very small) element of consistency to writing:

There are three magazines on the table. I want to read the magazine that arrived today.

[That introduces a restrictive clause: “that arrived today” identifies magazine .]

There are two pieces of junk mail and a magazine on the table. I want to read the magazine, which arrived today.

[Which introduces a nonrestrictive clause: “which arrived today” is not needed to identify magazine .]

McPhee explains that “the irregular restrictive which ” is reserved for sentences in which “words or phrases lie between the specific object and the clause that proves its specificity.” The term “irregular restrictive which ” seems to be a Shawn (or Harold Ross?) creation: the only evidence for it that I can find is McPhee’s essay.¹ This use of which , however, goes back at least as far as H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926), where it is explained in the entry “That, relative pronoun.” Fowler’s defining and non-defining are the equivalents of restrictive and nonrestrictive :

Each that -clause is, or at least may be meant as, defining; but between each & the actual noun of the antecedent . . . intervenes a clause or phrase that would suffice by itself for identification. In such circumstances a that-clause, though correct, is often felt to be queer, & it is usually possible, though by no means necessary, to regarded it as non-defining & change that to which .

McPhee gives three examples from his recent writing of “the irregular restrictive which .” Here is one:

In 1822, the Belgian stratigrapher J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy, working for the French government, put a name on the chalk of Europe which would come to represent an ungainly share of geologic time.

Try it the other way:

In 1822, the Belgian stratigrapher J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy, working for the French government, put a name on the chalk of Europe that would come to represent an ungainly share of geologic time.

I find it hard to see any difference: name seems the obvious antedecent each time. McPhee’s other examples leave me just as confused.

But I found a way out of my muddle by consulting Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009). In the entry "Remote relatives," Bryan Garner addresses “the exceptional which”, his name for what Shawn called “the irregular restrictive which.” Garner presents this use of which as an attempt to avoid ambiguity:

Garner’s final four sentences are a model of clear reasoning about usage. Now I know that I need not spend another second thinking about “the irregular restrictive which.” Clarity!

*

11:21 a.m.: Not done yet. The New Yorker ’s Eleanor Gould credited William Shawn:

[Quoted in Barbara Wallraff’s Word Court (2000). The sentence in question referred to “a dispute about language which they would like this column to resolve.”]

¹ Harold Ross, who founded the New Yorker, was a Modern English Usage devotee. From a 1949 letter to Kay Boyle:

We think ourselves into knots over style things around here, although we’ve long since cracked most problems. We’re having one now on when to use which and when to use that that is a little gem. Fowler, in Modern English Usage, differentiates between them and, somehow or other — I don’t know how, so help me — we got to following him in the editing of all house (or unsigned) stuff and then in practically all fact stuff (the writers are around the office and can be talked to from hour to hour), and then in more or less all the fiction, most of the writers falling into line.

Notice that Ross doesn’t use “the irregular restrictive which ”:

We’re having one now on when to use which and when to use that that is a little gem.

The logic of “the irregular restrictive which ” would have the sentence read:

We’re having one now on when to use which and when to use that which is a little gem.

I found this letter quoted in John Updike’s More Matter: Essays and Criticism (2009).

[I wonder: does “exceptionally well-edited” mean persnickety ?]

Draft, draft, draft, draft

In the April 29 New Yorker, John McPhee writes about writing and revision in “Draft No. 4”:

After reading the second draft aloud, and going through the piece for the third time (removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading), I enclose things in boxes for Draft No. 4. If I enjoy anything in this process it is Draft No. 4. I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. The final adjustments may be small-scale, but they are large to me, and I love addressing them.

No link: the piece is online for subscribers only.

Recently updated

Elvis pretzels Now with a photograph of Elvis Lamanna, the Elvis pretzel man.

Studying for finals

[Yorick and friend.]

Unscrewing the top of your head and pouring in information doesn’t work that well: the tidying up is terrible. Better strategies in this post: How to do well on a final exam.

In some corners of the world, final examinations are already in the near near future.

[“A young boy studying the human skull.” Photograph by Nina Leen. New York, New York, 1948. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Oscar’s Day today

I think that Geo-B and I are living parallel lives today, even if his cup holds coffee, not tea: Oscars’s Day No. 249.

6:24

I snoozed this morning in eight-minute increments all the way to 6:24. It felt pretty transgressive.

And so I’m a little late getting to the rest of Thursday. See you tomorrow.

Naked City Mongol

Yes, it’s a Mongol pencil in the social worker’s hand. The above images are from “Golden Lads and Girls,” an episode of Naked City that aired May 22, 1963. It tells the stories of two married couples, one living at 715 Park Avenue, the other in a tenement a few blocks away. The two husbands are alcoholic and violent; each man’s wife is his target. The parallels between the couples’ lives are heightened when the story cuts back and forth during their interviews with social workers, with questions put to one husband or wife answered by the other.

“Golden Lads and Girls” is a Naked City episode with a tremendous variety of ingredients: trips to Manhattan’s Home Term Court (an institution created in 1946 to address non-felony domestic cases); Tom Bosley as a judge; a quick stop at Toots Shor’s Restaurant; a group meeting at “Alcoholics Clinic” (that is, Alcoholics Anonymous); marital counseling; a nightmare-tormented, pyromaniacal child; and, for comic relief, a scene in a delicatessen with Lieutenant Mike Parker (Horace McMahon), Detective Adam Flint (Paul Burke), and Adam’s girlfriend Libby Kingston (Nancy Malone). Adam has ordered pastrami on white. On white?

Libby: “With Adam it's a matter of principle — nonconformity.”

Mike: “On rye bread, yes. On a hard roll, yes. But never on white. Have you no respect for the cultural heritages?”

Adam: “I like it on white. . . . Mike, you have to believe that pastrami won’t always come on rye.”

Libby: “Oh, I take it you’re using cold cuts as a symbol.”

Adam: “On white. It’s a symbol of hope.”

Libby describes the Park Avenue couple as “rich and very fashionable,” “part of the success culture, the golden lads and girls.” (Note: she knows no details. Adam has maintained confidentiality.)

Adam: “That’s from something, isn’t it?”

Libby recites: “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

Adam: “Shakespeare, Cymbeline.”

Mike: “You know, when I have lunch with you two, it’s like being with Bennett Cerf.”

That last line is the punchline, Bennett Cerf being Mike Parker’s idea of an hifalutin intellectual.

Back to those screenshots. The pencil’s identity is obvious. But do you recognize the actress? First prize is an all-expenses-paid week in the Naked City. You are responsible though for furnishing the time machine. Leave your answer in a comment.

Related reading

Other Mongol posts: Harry Truman with pencil : Jimmy Hoffa’s Mongol : Molly Dodd, Mongol user : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : “Sound-testing a MONGOL” : Stolen Mongols

Other Naked City posts: GRamercy 7–9166 : GRamercy again : MUrray Hill 7-3933 : Naked Bronx : Nearly plotzing : “Old Rabbit Ears” : Poetry and Naked City : Positively Naked City : TW8-4044 : “WE DELIVER”

[Orange Crate Art is a Naked City-friendly zone.]

Fran Lebowitz on voice

From the documentary Public Speaking (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2010), Fran Lebowitz, taking questions from an audience:

Q: “Do you think there’s a difference between a female voice and a male voice in literature?”

A: “Even on the phone there’s a difference between a female voice and a male voice.”