Orange car art

[Photograph by Elaine Fine. Click for a larger view.]

On the road as the sun set, one driver, one photographer, one shadow. From bottom to top: road, grass, corn, sky.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

Grammarly, WhiteSmoke

A student mentioned today that someone had recommended using Grammarly or WhiteSmoke to help with writing problems. I just looked at these online services. Grammarly costs $29.95 a month, $139.95 a year; WhiteSmoke, $79.95 a year.

There’s no way to try WhiteSmoke without signing up [see below], but I pasted into Grammarly’s demo the text of a review that I just wrote. My score: 71 of 100, “adequate, can benefit from revision.” The service alleged many problems: seven grammar errors, three spelling errors, two punctuation errors, two problems with “style and word choice,” and plagiarism. I would have to sign up to learn just where the alleged problems lie. But I already know where they lie: in the algorithms that found nonexistent problems.

I then tried a long excerpt from William Zinsser’s essay “Writing English as a Second Language.” Grammarly again alleged many problems. The overall score: 52 of 100. "Weak, needs revision," Grammarly said. But then I remembered: Zinsser’s essay has sentences and passages of dull, lifeless writing to illustrate cumbersome phrasing, inappropriate use of the passive voice, and so on. I went back and deleted those passages. The score went up to a 54.

Feeling sneaky, I tried a passage from the Grammarly website. Grammarly is slick: if you try to check text from its site, you’re told that “You cannot improve on perfection.” So I changed every Grammarly in the passage to WhiteSmoke and scored a 61 ("weak, needs revision"). Could the camel-cased WhiteSmoke be a problem? I changed it to Michael and got another 61. Any service that gives its own writing a 61 and William Zinsser a 54 is a service I wouldn’t trust. I’ll add that any service that gives my writing a higher score than Zinsser’s is a service I wouldn’t trust.

Here’s a thoughtful review of Grammarly from someone who signed up (and who no longer runs Grammarly ads). I’m unable to find anything equally thoughtful about WhiteSmoke, but the reviews at CNET are overwhelmingly negative. Some of those reviews, granted, could be the work of a competitor, but I can see no reason to recommend the service.

For the cost of a couple of months of Grammarly or a year of WhiteSmoke, you could buy a serious dictionary, a writing handbook, and Garner’s Modern American Usage, resources that would serve you well for many years. Learning from those resources, you could become a better writer. That’s how it happens, not by trusting to algorithms.

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January 9, 2014: An open-source alternative: Language Tool. Language Tool did a much better job than Grammarly with the review that I mention above, flagging thirty-two possible spelling errors (mostly compound words and proper names) and a possible wrong word. More interesting: Language Tool noted two instances of the same word beginning three successive sentences. The word is the, and in one case, the repetition is harmless; in the other, purposeful. But such repetition isn’t always harmless or purposeful, and mechanical scrutiny might reveal a genuine problem that even a careful writer has overlooked. I didn’t notice the first triple-the until Language Tool pointed it out.

Language Tool is available for download and online use. Thanks to developer Daniel Naber for letting me know about it.

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November 26, 2014: WhiteSmoke now has a demo. Pasting in text from the company’s website, two or three paragraphs at a time, the only score I could pull was an 80 (of 100), with one to five “critical writing mistakes” per sample.

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November 29, 2014: Comments on this post add some background on the computer science that goes into WhiteSmoke.

Pilot Razor Points

Looking at supplies in an Office Max this past weekend, I was surprised to see that the Pilot Razor Point is now an object of nostalgia: “The Yellow Cap Original,” the package says, “Since 1974.” Pilot Razor Points served me well through college and some of grad school. I haven’t used one in years, but I had to buy a four-pack.

The only difference in design that I notice: the yellow top now has a deep well with a hole in its side (lessening the danger of suffocation if the cap is inhaled or swallowed). The pen has the same shiny barrel, the same plastic point, the same thin dark line. Using fountain pens for years makes me realize how light this pen is — too light, really. But I’m enjoying the opportunity to commune with my disposable past.

I have no idea when I bought the single Razor Point in the photograph. This pen, stashed away in a drawer, goes back to the time when Wal-Mart items carried price stickers.

If you like this post, you should read this one: Five pens. It’s the story of my life in five pens: a Parker Jotter, a no-name ballpoint, the Uni-Ball, a Mont Blanc, and a Pelikan. There’s also “a long blur of Bics, Flairs, and Pilot Razor Points.”

Dots

Elaine and I have tried telling ourselves that Dots is a piece of educational software, teaching us colors and shapes. Repeat after us: “I am not playing a game. I am having an educational experience.” We have also tried telling ourselves that we can quit whenever we want. But we know better. Dots is fiendishly addictive. With tricks, trophies (see the Nerd Dot trophy above), and more and more dots, there is no end in sight.

Dots is available for iOS and Android.

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October 12: A Dots update adds an Endless Mode ($1.99).

I have begun to think of Dots as the mobile-device form of “the Entertainment,” the MacGuffin at the heart of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Endless Mode clinches the connection. The only symbol that could be more telling than ∞: ☺, the symbol found on copies of the Entertainment.

I have no plans to purchase endlessness. And I’d be careful about clicking on that smiley face if I were you.

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October 27: Dots was once happily ad-free. Today’s update adds an ad for Samsung, whose technology now manages weekly lists of top Dots scores. Yes, a Samsung ad in iOS. That’s part of the ad to the left. No thanks. Our devices are now Dots-free.

There’s a reminder here, for me and for anyone reading: if you like an app, read before you update. The developer’s description makes no mention of the ad, but the comments from users do. And how.

If you’re already in iOS 7, you can turn off automatic updates.

Van Dyke Parks on Bookworm

Michael Silverblatt recently interviewed Van Dyke Parks on KCRW’s Bookworm . A sample:

“I don’t draw any distinction between the stuff that has my name on the banner or something that I might do anonymously to help someone else in their album effort. It’s all the same to me. . . . Someone asked [Henry Busse] once about who would be billed on the marquee. He said, ‘I don’t eat light bulbs.’ And that’s the way I feel about it.”

Trumpeter and bandleader Henry Busse co-wrote “Wang Wang Blues.” On tour in Europe with Paul Whiteman, he came across Robert Katscher’s song “Madonna, du bist schöner als der Sonnenschein,” which became “When Day Is Done” (with English lyrics by Buddy DeSylva). Busse played cornet on the Whiteman hit recording. Elaine and I swing that song like crazy, violin and guitar, though we’d never heard of Henry Busse. To borrow from an old commercial: When Van Dyke Parks talks, people learn stuff.

Howlin’ Wolf on Shindig!

Howlin’ Wolf performs “How Many More Years,” May 26, 1965. The pianist is Billy Preston, a member of the Shindig! house band. Two young English gentlemen, identified only as “Mick” and “Brian,” are speaking with host Jack Good.

My post about John Milward’s book Crossroads mentions this performance, which I’ve watched again and again over the past few days.

Book review: John Milward, Crossroads

John Milward. Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock ’n’ Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues) . Illustrated by Margie Greve. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2013. $29.95 hardcover. $28.99 e-book. ix + 259 pages.

Music history sometimes gets reduced to evolutionary theory: Roy Eldridge as the (not-missing) link between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. Or instrument-specific chemistry: Coleman Hawkins + Lester Young = Sonny Rollins. Or as Muddy Waters posited, reproduction, with the blues having a baby and naming it rock ’n’ roll. Reality is always more complex, a matter of countless influences, overtones, ancestors. In this book, music critic John Milward does justice to the complexities. As the title metaphor suggests, Crossroads is indeed “a history of connections” — delightful, improbable, and rewarding, as rock musicians drew deep inspiration from blues, and blues musicians gained new (young, white) audiences for their work.

The story begins with white eccentrics of the 1940s and ’50s: record collectors who sought out the most arcane, obscure pre-war 78s. The collector James McKune played a major role in shaping the tastes of later listeners, as did Harry Smith, whose records became the stuff of what must be the most influential bootleg ever released, Folkways’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). The more popular blues musicians of the recent past were of little interest to these men: they leaned to Skip James and Charlie Patton, not Lonnie Johnson and Tampa Red. It is astonishing to think, now, of how little time separated these collectors from the musicians of their recordings: one might think of listening to James or Patton in the ’50s as comparable to listening to some ’80s band today. Milward reminds us though just how inaccessible the world of pre-war blues was (or at least seemed to be), with more obscure 78s known from one or two surviving copies, and the musicians little more than names. Even Robert Johnson, now almost a household word, was for many years known only from the material on a single 1961 Columbia LP.

The 1960s brought new developments. When folk music boomed, electric musicians with dwindling audiences put away their amps and became, at least briefly, folk performers (witness Muddy Waters’s 1964 album Folk Singer). “Rediscovered” or newly noticed older acoustic musicians — the Reverend Gary Davis, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James — influenced a generation of young fingerpicking guitarists. Young electric musicians, American and British — Mike Bloomfield, John Mayall, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones — took up the Chicago blues idiom, or, in the case of Canned Heat, that idiom’s Mississippi Delta origins. Guitar heroes — Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page — flourished. And thus veteran electric musicians found new audiences, with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf playing the Fillmores West and East and other hippie ballrooms and recording with their musical descendants. The dynamics of authority and influence must have been at times awkward, what with Waters opening for Clapton or serving as the entertainment at a record-company party for the Stones. But for a working musician, good gigs are good gigs. Consider this exchange between B. B. King and Buddy Guy, crossing paths at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, as recounted by Guy:

“Wasn’t for these English cats, I’d be playing a bar in Three Mule, Mississippi,” said King. “Here I am on my way to Fillmore East in New York City. I think Bill Graham got me booked with the Byrds. Where you off to, Buddy?”

“A traveling hippie festival in Canada. We going by train to four or five different cities. They say it’s gonna be bigger than Woodstock.”

“Hendrix on it?”

“Don’t think so,” I said. “But Janis Joplin is.”

Crossroads abounds in such moments of connection: B. B. King meeting Charlie Parker; Mississippi John Hurt watching a double bill of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! ; Muddy Waters receiving a key to the town of Woodstock, New York; Keith Richards learning open-G tuning from Ry Cooder and passing it on to Ike Turner; Jimi Hendrix turning Robert Petway’s “Catfish Blues” into “Voodoo Chile”; Duane Allman turning a seven-note vocal phrase from Albert King’s “As the Years Go Passing By” into the signature guitar phrase of “Layla”; John Lee Hooker playing with Miles Davis. The commerce of the old and the new was sometimes a little too easy, to be sure: details of sheer ripping-off abound, as in the light-fingered musical borrowings of Led Zeppelin and the shameless exploiting of Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James. “I bought Skip James for $200,” John Fahey is quoted as saying. Music, we must remember, is a business.

John Milward has done his homework: he seems to have read every relevant autobiography, biography, and work of musical history, and his book abounds in choice anecdotes and surprising details, drawn from published sources and his own interviews. He offers memorable phrases and wry observations, characterizing John Lee Hooker’s music as an “urbane Delta trance,” noting that Willie Dixon switched from boxing to music without realizing that they shared “the same business ethics,” pointing out that blues (in the forms of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf) has become the music of Viagra commercials. O tempora o mores.

Crossroads is in need of small repairs. The jazz festival is Montreux, not Montreaux. The record label is Revenant Records, not Reverent. The Scotch is Johnnie Walker, not Johnny. Canned Heat and John Lee Hooker recorded Hooker ’n Heat in 1970, not 1971. There are typos here and there, and a paragraph that ends with a comma. The narrative sometimes loses its way in a welter of detail: on one page, I counted the names of nineteen musicians or bands, six songs, and four record labels. But as a knowledgeable introduction to musical currents in the 1960s and beyond, Crossroads serves very well. It makes the pleasure of music a greater pleasure.

My favorite moment of connection in the book: Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, and the Stones all in Los Angeles; House for a folk festival, Wolf and the Stones for Shindig! It was 1965, and truly a time of wonders.

Thanks to the publisher for a review copy of the book.

[“The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll” is a song by Muddy Waters. A second Robert Johnson LP appeared in 1970; the Complete Recordings, in 1990. “An easy commerce of the old and the new”: from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets.]

Music, old and new

I’ve gone to two concerts in as many days, and here, as they say, is the thing:

The recent music that I heard — not so-called “new music” but music just a handful of years old — had nothing interesting about it. It was banal, relentlessly diatonic, with every effect a special one, a gimmick. It was the older music, by Maurice Ravel and a handful of pre-Baroque composers, that sounded utterly new, with nothing stale or contrived about it. I intend no generalization here: there’s much recent music of all sorts that I love, and orchestral warhorses often leave me cold. My point is that what’s good stays good, and, in some way, new. I’ll quote Emerson: “perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in any work of art.”

From the local news

In a feature about aging, the anchor exclaimed, “Man, there are a lot of people getting older!” And: they’re not just Baby Boomers. Imagine that. Thank you, local news.

Also from the local news, an unnecessary clarification.

Ashbery at criticism

In the latest Poetry Project Newsletter (no. 236), John Ashbery writes about a new book from Robert Elstein, Helen Arms (Green Zone Editions, 2013). Ashbery zooms in on a line from an earlier poem, “Hermes Holding an Orange”: “I’d shake hands, but I left my mittens in the cafeteria”:

The ambiguities are multifarious. Why would forgetting mittens preclude a handshake? Surely, it would be rude to shake someone’s hand with a scratchy mitten on yours. And why were they left in the cafeteria? It sounds like they were left on purpose, but if so, what could that be? Is it part of some anarchist plot or meant, perhaps, to ease things for the next customer? But one mustn’t break butterflies on wheels. The butterflies will do just fine for themselves.

That’s lovely, and it’s a reminder that the line between literary criticism and parody can be a fine one, very fine, the kind drawn with a 0.38 mm Uni-ball Signo gel pen, or an erasable ballpoint.

And if you’re wondering, Ashbery writes as an admirer: “I’ve been waiting six years for a sequel to Robert Elstein’s slim volume, The Hollandaise, whose manic vocabulary knocked me out of my chair the first time I read it.”

Related reading
All John Ashbery posts (Pinboard)
The Poetry Project