Happy birthday, Dad

I went out to look for a birthday card for my dad a few weeks ago and came away empty-handed. The not-from-a-kid son-to-father cards ran to beer, cuss words, hammocks, and bad poetry, none of which fit my dad. So I made a card: I found a hexagonal grid online, sized and printed it, and turned it into a tile floor with an 85 set in hexagons. Something like this, old-school.

My dad turns 85, or eighty-five, today. He worked as a tileman in northern New Jersey, Leddy Ceramic Tile, and he’s made many beautiful cards for birthdays and holidays. Thus my card, a second-generation effort.

Happy birthday, Dad.

Some art by James Leddy
Abe’s shades : Boo! : Happy holidays : Hardy mums : Thanks!

[The cuss card offered thanks for teaching the card-giver to talk like the card-recipient. Sheesh. I like to spell numbers up to one hundred, but not on a tile floor, not even a virtual tile floor. My wife Elaine thinks that “I like to spell numbers” means that I have a strange hobby, so I’ll rephrase: I prefer to write out numbers up to one hundred.]

VDP on NPR

Van Dyke Parks interviewed on NPR: Van Dyke Parks Lights Up Songs from Inside.

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)

A bookstore opening and closing

J. L. Sathre, January 2012: 25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore.

J. L. Sathre, May 2013: 25 Things I’m Learning From Closing a Bookstore.

The store had a seven-year run.

Chris Matthews on sex

Chris Matthews, in an MSNBC Hardball discussion of the Anthony Weiner scandal, June 17, 2011:

“Sex is generally between two people in private, you know, in some room somewhere.”

Chris Matthews, in an MSNBC Hardball discussion of the Anthony Weiner scandal, July 25, 2013:

“This isn’t meeting in some hotel somewhere with somebody you’ve known a while or anything like that.”

The first rule of sex: Get a room!

You can watch yesterday’s discussion here, or somewhere.

[It’s fun watching Chris Matthews attempt to talk about sex, and there should be more opportunities in the days ahead.]

SMITH BUILDING

[A store entryway, somewhere in downstate Illinois. Click for a larger view.]

Words from hexagons: a beautiful feature of the dowdy world.

I once lived in a Boston apartment building with “THE GRESHAM” tiled into the entryway floor. How come I never took a photograph?

Another tile-centric post
96th and Lexington

[Dad, I saw this floor after I made your card.]

“What once seemed ours forever”

From J. L. Carr’s 1980 novella A Month in the Country :

We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours forever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

A Month in the Country is best read in summer, especially when fall begins to loom — as I suppose it always does.

Another passage from A Month in the Country
“Creatures of hope”

[The novella has been reissued by New York Review Books (2000).]

WCW for young readers

When my children were younger, we found a reliable source of family fun in William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Make up substitutes for the nouns — oh, say, dinosaur, poop, umbrellas — and you too can play.

Too late for my family to make use of, A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams, by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2008), is the work of a writer and an artist with a genuine feeling for Williams’s work. Bryant presents Willie Williams as a boy strongly attuned to the natural world, who looks, listens, writes, and abandons lofty poeticality for the language of everyday things. The book’s pages are often beautifully collaged, though nothing is said about Williams’s interest in visual art. One disappointment: Williams’s mature poetry is presented as the work of the boy Willie, a choice that takes us (no doubt unintentionally) too close to my-kid-could-have-written-that territory. Then again, thinking that a kid wrote those poems might be all some other kid needs to feel inspired about writing.

This book would make a wonderful gift for a young reader.

Related reading
All Willam Carlos Williams posts (Pinboard)

A grammar infographic

I receive occasional e-mail pitches for snazzy infographics, none of which have made it to the pages of Orange Crate Art. These poster-like creations teem with statements that I have no way to verify. And infographics tend to be the work of, let’s say, interested parties. A recent infographic that purported to trace the history of the United States Postal Service was a thinly disguised pitch for an online stamp dealer — which helped to explain why most of the poster was about rare stamps and $$$.

Here is an infographic that I noticed circulating online today. The source is grammar.net, a website offering online grammar- and spell-checking (and offline software). Of the ten tips on this skeuomorphic page, five have problems:


[Click for a larger view.]

“Mind apostrophes”: The explanation and examples are, at best, confusing. A clearer explanation: “Check whether the word is a contraction or a possessive pronoun. Only a contraction takes an apostrophe.” Keeping the examples in a consistent sequence — it’s /its , they’re /their — would help too. A less obvious problem: possessive case is a dubious term. The Chicago Manual of Style (5.19) and Huddleston and Pullum’s A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar (9.1) recommend genitive case. But why bring in the category of case at all? Possessive pronoun works.

“Always use a comma after an introductory or prepositional phrase”: Introductory and prepositional are not contrasting terms. Better advice: “Always use a comma after an introductory phrase or clause.”

“Memorise homophones and endings”: the -able /-ible rule has many exceptions. To offer this rule without qualification is unconscionable. One must be flexible.

“Appositives: these dependent clauses modify the subject and often add non-essential information – offset with commas”: Lynne Truss must have helped punctuate that sentence. But more to the point: an appositive is a word or phrase, not a dependent clause. An appositive may modify any noun or pronoun. The sample sentences contain appositives (Brian O’Brien, the popular sitcom), not dependent clauses.

“Countable and non-countable nouns”: Few works with countable nouns, not non-countable nouns. Few dresses , houses , cars ? Yes. Few money , snow , or time ? No. No!

Go in fear of infographics.

Related reading
All grammar posts (Pinboard)

[I can’t insist on the that / which  distinction. Notice though that tip no. 6 seems to imply that that can introduce a non-restrictive clause. And I won’t argue for a larger point: that most of these tips concern punctuation, spelling, and usage, not grammar.]

Beckett and Bushmiller

[“Oh this is a happy day!”]

George Bodmer, who draws Oscar’s Day, asked if I knew anything about this: The Beckett/Bushmiller Letters. Now I do.

Thanks, George.

Related reading
All Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Page Morton Black (1915–2013)

From the New York Times obituary: “For Gothamites of a certain vintage, it was as much a part of life as BUtterfield, ALgonquin and Horn & Hardart — a jaunty little waltz, its lyrics connoting warmth, fiscal security and celestial reward.”

Paige Morton Black sang the Chock Full o’Nuts jingle.

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Chock Full o’Nuts
Chock Full o’Nuts lunch hour
New York, 1964: Chock Full o’Nuts