Vin Scully on statues

KPCC’s Off-Ramp recently had a wonderful segment with Ben Bergman interviewing the sportscaster Vin Scully. Here is Scully responding to the question of what he would like a statue of him to say:

“I would rather just be part of the scenery, rather than be standing out. And there was another famous expression, and I forget who said it, but he said, ‘I would rather be questioned why they don’t have a statue for me than to be questioned as to why they do have a statue,’ and I’ll take that as a pretty good answer.”

I know next to nothing about baseball, but listening to this interview makes me want to listen to Vin Scully call a Dodgers game, something he has been doing since 1950, when the team was still in Brooklyn. There is at least one more chance this year, though in Illinois the Dodgers Radio Network is nearly nonexistent.

How to improve writing (no. 46)

[Mark Trail, October 17, 2013. Click for a larger view.]

Given the tools available to me, I can’t do much to improve Mark Trail’s “cell phone,” which looks more like the battery from my old Sony Vaio. But I can improve writing. The last panel is the problem:


[Mark Trail, original.]

As Dusty Rhodes asks, what are you getting at, Mark? What’s on that phone of yours? The problem is the misplaced modifier “except us.” Garner’s Modern American Usage explains:

When modifying words are separated from the words they modify, readers have a hard time processing the information. Indeed, there likely to attach the modified language first to a nearby word or phrase.

Garner offers a grimly comic example: “Both died in an apartment Dr. Kevorkian was leasing after inhaling carbon monoxide,” a sentence suggesting that Kervorkian inhaled before he leased. Here’s what Mark Trail should have said:


[Mark Trail, revised.]

Between today’s strip and tomorrow’s, Dusty will probably figure things out.

This post marks the second time I’ve improved writing in a Mark Trail strip. Here’s the first. I rely on the free Mac app Seashore when I make such improvements.

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 46 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Privilege signs

Those signs, often for Coca-Cola, sometimes for Pepsi-Cola, that used to adorn candy stores and small grocery stores, and sometimes still do: they are called privilege signs (The New York Times).

Reading the Times article reminds me that I should mention James and Karla Murray’s book Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York (Gingko Press, 2011). It was a gift from my son. Thank you, Ben. There are samples online.

The Times reports that more than half the storefronts photographed for the book are now gone.

The worst sentences in Salinger so far

I’m now up to page 408 of David Shields and Shane Salerno’s Salinger. For sheer hokum, pages 304 to 314, Shields’s trek through Nine Stories, are impossible to beat. But I can’t type all that. Here instead is a passage from page 376, also by Shields, prompted by a reference in “Franny” to Franny Glass’s “tense, almost fetal position”:

If pregnancy is not the main idea here, what is? That Franny, a mythological female, is suffering a postwar nervous breakdown? The mystic’s confused searching for meaning is fulfilled through the use of young girls’ bodies. The womb is the reincarnated war wound. Franny is prayerful witness to the necessity of her creator’s war survival.

Given these biographers’ reductive interpretations of imaginative writing (as disguised autobiography and symbols), it’s probably to the book’s advantage that it has relatively little to say about Salinger’s work. Salinger is reductive about the life as well. One example: Shields and Salerno write that “From his introduction to Vedanta until his death in 2010, Salinger’s life strictly followed the four stages of life, or asramas, as explained by Salinger’s spiritual teacher Swami Nikhilananda.” A clumsy sentence, sure. The bigger problem: Shields and Salerno date Salinger’s earliest acquaintance with Vedanta to 1946. But they offer a description of the first asrama that covers Salinger’s life pre-1946 : as student, suitor of Oona O’Neill, writer for “the slicks,” and infantryman. In other words, Shields and Salerno have Salinger following Vedanta before he was following Vedanta.

Shields and Salerno seem so intent upon believing in their four-stage scheme of things that they miss obvious humor: Buddy Glass’s description of himself (in “Seymour: An Introduction”) as “a fourth-class Karma Yogin” has, I venture to say, nothing to do with the four asramas. “Fourth-class” is a self-deprecating joke. It should make us think of fourth-class mail.

Related reading
The worst sentence in Salinger so far (to page 137)
The worst sentences in Salinger so far (to page 244)
All J. D. Salinger posts (Pinboard)

A new book from David Plowden

The photographer David Plowden has a new book of his work, Heartland: The Plains and the Prairie. Here is a slideshow. Plowden captures, again and again, the desolate beauty of what I will call the Midwestern Sublime.

A related post
Photographer David Plowden

A historian’s take on current events

Geoffrey Parker, Professor of History at The Ohio State University, interviewed today on PRI’s The World :

Looking at the outside world, it is just incredulity that the greatest power in the world cannot get its act together. I mean, to link the default on sovereign debt, something which really does tarnish a country, to a particular piece of legislation which was already passed: I don’t think anyone outside the United States can understand that, how we could be holding the economy of the world to ransom, in return for some concessions on a piece of legislation which has already passed. What is there still to discuss? That’s what I think the rest of the world can’t understand. And I think one year, ten years, a hundred years from now, that will still be something which is very hard to understand.

*

October 17: Here’s a link to the interview, which was not yet online when I made this post.

“Quicksaaaand!”

Another item in Roz Chast’s book: quicksand, the subject of the recent Radiolab episode “Quicksaaaand!” The discussion of quicksand in the movies makes me realize that, yes, people were always falling into quicksand when I was a boy, in movies and in the schoolyard. You don’t see that so much anymore.

This podcast, a mere sixteen minutes, is one of the best Radiolab episodes I’ve heard.

The many hates of Roz Chast

No need for a poll: it’s safe to say that Roz Chast is our fambly’s favorite New Yorker cartoonist. What I Hate: From A to Z (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011) includes alien abduction, balloons, carnivals, doctors, elevators, and many, many more. You’ll want to collect them all.

Here’s an Orange Crate Art post from 2007 with the glasses-wearing bearded guy who appears again and again in Chast’s cartoons. I look less like him than I once did.

Best wishes to Jack Cella

Jack Cella has retired after forty-three years as the general manager of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore. I know him only as many a Seminary Co-op customer would, as the man in the little alcove near the front of the store. He had the answer to every question.

Jack Cella, in a 2008 Chicago Tribune article on the Co-op: “If you’re in a decent bookstore, you can look at any shelf and realize how little you know. I can’t imagine life without reading.”

Here is a salute from Kristi McGuire, a former manager of 57th Street Books: End of an era: Farewell to Jack Cella.

To: Miley Cyrus From: Sufjan Stevens

From a (hilarious) open letter from Sufjan Stevens to Miley Cyrus:

Dear Miley. I can’t stop listening to #GetItRight (great song, great message, great body), but maybe you need a quick grammar lesson. One particular line causes concern: “I been laying in this bed all night long.” Miley, technically speaking, you’ve been LYING, not LAYING, an irregular verb form that should only be used when there’s an object, i.e. “I been laying my tired booty on this bed all night long.” Whatever. I’m not the best lyricist, but you know what I mean. #Get It Right The Next Time.

And there’s more.