A small bit of good news

From The New York Times:

Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday that if President Bashar al-Assad wants to avert an attack on Syria he should hand over all of his chemical weapons within one week. Russia, the Syrian government’s most important backer, quickly welcomed the idea.

The United States has had ample experience of what can happen when limited military engagements, premised on “high confidence,” begin to play out. The choice, to my mind, is not between doing nothing and bombing; the choice is between bombing and seeking alternatives to bombing.

Space cadet

[Messrs. Kramden (Jackie Gleason) and Norton (Art Carney).]

I noticed a fascinating bit of language use in “TV or Not TV,” an episode of The Honeymooners that aired on October 1, 1955. Ralph and Norton have chipped in to buy a television. They disagree of course about what to watch. It’s been nothing but “space shows, westerns, cartoon frolics, and puppet shows,” Ralph says. Indeed, Norton has just been watching Captain Video and His Video Rangers. And Ralph wants to watch a movie. But Norton keeps changing the channel. And Ralph, in exasperation: “Look. Look, you . . . space cadet.”

The Oxford English Dictionary dates space cadet (“a trainee spaceman or spacewoman”) to 1948 and dates other meanings of the term (“a person regarded as out of touch with reality, esp. (as if) as a result of taking drugs; a person prone to flights of fancy or irrational or strange behaviour”) to 1973. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate dates such meanings (“a flaky, lightheaded, or forgetful person”) to 1979. But here from 1955 is a use of space cadet that seems to convey such meanings perfectly. As Ralph points out again and again, Norton is a maniac, a nut. From “Something Fishy” (December 17, 1955): “The only thing out of order here is your head.”

But then again it may be my head that’s out of order, and that I’m hearing more in Ralph’s words than they could have meant in 1955. What complicates matters is another 1950s television series, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. In 1955, calling Norton a space cadet may have been no worse than calling him a Junior G-Man or a Mouseketeer. The insult might speak only to Norton’s delight in children’s fare, not to a lack of contact with reality.

Elaine wondered if this episode of The Honeymooners, playing through the years in reruns, might have kept space cadet alive as an insult and played a part in the term’s later meanings.

And now we blast off for Pluto and the moon.

Related reading
All Honeymooners posts (Pinboard)

[The trick by which Ralph gets the television in his apartment is always worth a try: “Head I win, tails you lose.”]

A very special guest (TNYT)

Had I looked at my stats more carefully, I would have realized that something was up: The New York Times has an obituary today for typewriter repairman Manson H. Whitlock.

I am amused that someone from our newspaper of record should be stopping by here in the course of work. O seasoned, trained gatekeeper, if I knew you were comin’ I’d’ve baked a cake.

If the cake puzzles you, here’s the explanation.

No pioneer!

The New York Times crossword puzzle appears in syndication five weeks after publication in the Times. My blog stats today suggest that August 3’s 46-Down baffled many solvers. The clue: “Cool jazz pioneer.” The answer: TORME.

Mel Tormé was many things — a singer, a songwriter, a drummer, a pianist, an actor, a writer — but he was not a cool jazz pioneer. My August 3 post, popular today, suggests how the puzzle may have come to include this far-fetched characterization.

[Post title with apologies to Willa Cather and Walt Whitman.]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, September 7, 2013.]

The workers at Hi-Lo Amalgamated must have had great fun coming up with that “edgy” band name. I think they had so much fun that they forgot how car and driveway go together: like so.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

A Salinger review

A. O. Scott reviews the documentary film Salinger (dir. Shane Salerno) for The New York Times:

It does not so much explore the life and times of J. D. Salinger as run his memory and legacy through a spin cycle of hype. Salinger moved to the woods of New Hampshire partly to escape the intrusions and indignities of American celebrity culture. Salinger is that culture’s revenge.

It sounds dreadful. The biography, on its way to my door, sounds dreadful too. But to borrow a memorable line from John Williams’s novel Stoner : What did you expect?

Related reading
All J. D. Salinger posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

At State and Lake (Route 66 ) Now with an e-mail from the daughter of the man who owned the State & Lake Fruit and Nut Shop, seen for a fleeting moment in a 1962 episode of Route 66.

The Internet will always amaze me.

A thought about writing

From Wilson Follett:

Wherever we can make twenty-five words do the work of fifty, we halve the area in which looseness and disorganization can flourish, and by reducing the span of attention required we increase the force of the thought. To make our words count for as much as possible is surely the simplest as well as the hardest secret of style. Its difficulty consists in the ceaseless pursuit of the thousand ways of rectifying our mistakes, eliminating our inaccuracies, and replacing our falsities — in a word, editing our prose.

Modern American Usage (1966)

I like that near-rhyme: “the force of the thought.”

Borges manuscript found

Found, in Argentina’s National Library, an unpublished bit of writing by Jorge Luis Borges, an alternate ending for the 1944 story “Tema del traidor y del heroe” [Theme of the traitor and the hero]. The Latin American Herald Tribune offers this speculation:

Borges may have planned for the manuscript to be discovered, since in “Tema del traidor and del heroe” the protagonist’s great-grandson discovers a handwritten article in the National Library’s archives.

Well, no. The great-grandson himself, a man named Ryan, is the protagonist and the narrator of the story whose plot the narrator of “Tema del traidor y del heroe” describes. Ryan finds a manuscript in “the archives,” but Borges’s story does not say where they are located.

Still, I like the speculation.

[The story appears in translation in Labyrinths (1962) and Collected Fictions (1999). I missed hearing Borges read at Columbia University in April 1980, during a New York City transit strike, and I’ve never forgiven myself for not at least trying to get there.]

King’s Row, wet ink

[Parris Mitchell (Robert Cummings) writes home. Click on any image for a larger view.]

My dad has told me again and again that I should see King’s Row (dir. Sam Wood, 1942). I finally did. It’s a terrific film. That Ronald Reagan is one of its stars was no recommendation to me, but the principal players — Cummings, Betty Field, Claude Rains, Reagan, Ann Sheridan — are uniformly excellent. Another star of this film: James Wong Howe’s cinematography. King’s Row is one of the most luminous films I’ve seen. Look at the glistening ink above.

There’s a moment in King’s Row in which Howe pays tribute to fellow deep-focus stylist Gregg Toland. Here, from Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941), is Susan Alexander’s bedroom, foreground, middle ground, and background all in focus:



And here, from King’s Row , is Parris’s grandmother’s bedroom:



And now I want to see Transatlantic (dir. William K. Howard, 1931), Howe’s early effort in deep focus.