Failure v. non-success

From the Naked City episode “A Succession of Heartbeats” (October 26, 1960), spoken by Andy Brent (played by Frank Overton):

“All my life I just missed. Always one step short of success. Not so much a failure as a non-success. You can learn to live with failure — most people do. It’s a lot rougher living with non-success.”

Nobody writes them like Stirling Silliphant.

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In our little house on the prairie

How odd to be snowbound and find ourselves running low on — of all things — salt. It is like being stuck in a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel. And not just any Laura Ingalls Wilder novel: it is like being stuck in the one Laura Ingalls Wilder novel I’ve read. If the weather keeps up, I may have to burn its pages for fuel.

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Snowbound (a very short play)

William Parker Quartet, Wood Flute Songs

[Wood Flute Songs: Anthology/Live 2006-2012. The William Parker Quartet: Lewis Barnes, trumpet; Rob Brown, alto saxophone; William Parker, bass, reeds; Hamid Drake, drums. Guests: AMR Ensemble; Billy Bang, violin; Bobby Bradford, cornet; Leena Conquest; vocals; Cooper-Moore, piano; James Spaulding, alto saxophone; Eri Yamamoto, piano. AUM Fidelity, 2013. AUM080–87.]

This eight-CD set is a bargain, but that’s not a good reason to buy it. A good reason is that Parker’s quartet, together for thirteen years, is a great band. It is one of the great groups in jazz. Its closest analogues, to my mind: Ornette Coleman’s 1960 quartet, Charles Mingus’s 1964 sextet, Miles Davis’s mid-’60s quintet. The empathy among the members of the Parker quartet is uncanny, and the music — fueled by endlessly inventive bass and drums — is consistently beautiful and exciting and inspiring. It all makes me wonder: how do these musicians stand it when they can’t be making music?

Here is a track listing. Here are one, two short videos. Here is a twenty-minute sampler. And here is a post that I wrote after hearing the quartet last fall.

Winter weather wisdom

Courtesy of CNN, copied right from the screen:

Dress in loose layers

Wear a hat

Cover most of your body

That’s television as a PowerPoint slide, a slide that whose last eight words seem suitable for an audience five or six or seven years old. And on MSNBC yesterday, a reporter standing in the cold advised viewers to Be Prepared. Which meant — I’m not making it up — a coat, a hat, and gloves or mittens.

Fresca’s blog today shows shows many cold-weather battlers wearing plaid. I find in these photographs strong support for my belief that plaid really is warmer. My revised CNN slide:

Dress in loose layers of plaid

Wear a hat of plaid

Cover most of your body in plaid

Or better yet, stay inside if you can, also in plaid.

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Phil Silvers in plaid

Linus, nauseated

[Peanuts, January 8, 1967, reappearing as today’s strip. The pink background is well chosen.]

Lucy has made a piece of toast for her brother and has extracted from him ever more fulsome expressions of gratitude: “Thank you, dear sister.” “Thank you, dear sister . . greatest of all sisters.” “Thank you, dear sister, greatest of all sisters, without whom I’d never survive!” If anyone in the comics is going to observe a distinction between nauseated and nauseous, it would be Linus van Pelt.

I learned about this distinction — if it is one — from David Foster Wallace: “Nauseous for nauseated” is one entry in the page-long catalogue of bad usage that prefaces Wallace’s essay “Tense Present.” In Infinite Jest, Kate Gompert speaks of feeling nauseous. Her doctor refers to feeling nauseated. The novel’s third-person narrator also distinguishes between the words.

This distinction — if it is one — has a long history for snoots and sticklers. There’s no entry for it in the original Fowler’s. Nor is there one in the 1959 edition of The Elements of Style. But Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer (1965) has it:

A thing is nauseous if it makes one sick to the stomach; the unfortunate victim of this malaise is nauseated. The common misuse of nauseous appears in this passage: “When he sits too long, turns his head too abruptly, or walks any distance, he gets dizzy, loses balance, and becomes nauseous.” He doesn’t become nauseous unless he turns other people’s stomachs; he becomes nauseated. A person who feel sick is no more nauseous than a person who has been poisoned is poisonous.

Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage (1967) makes a brief mention:

When, for example, we have two adjectives, nauseous and nauseated, it should be clear that the first applies to the substance that causes the state named in the second. To call oneself nauseous except in self-depreciation is to ignore the point of view of the word.

I wonder: could the language of advertising have prompted attention to these words? Were people in mid-’60s Pepto-Bismol commercials proclaiming themselves to be nauseous? I have a vague memory of such commercials — “I . . . feel . . . nauseous.” Or was it “I . . . feel . . . awful”? Did such commercials precede these books? I don’t know.

E. B. White caught up in the third (1979) edition of The Elements of Style:

Nauseous. Nauseated. The first means “sickening to contemplate”; the second means “sick at the stomach.” Do not, therefore, say, “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.

And Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009) says that the use of nauseous for nauseated

is becoming so common that to call it an error is to exaggerate. Even so, careful writers tend to be sickened by the slippage and to follow the traditional distinction in formal writing: what is nauseous makes one feel nauseated.

And examples of careful use follow, the first of which comes from — yes, from David Foster Wallace. In Bryan Garner’s Language-Change Index, nauseous for nauseated is at Stage 4, meaning that use is “virtually universal but is opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts (die-hard snoots).”

The repeated if it is one in this post signals my skepticism about this distinction. There are many -ous words that can describe people (cantankerous, flirtatious, generous, outrageous); nauseous is easily at home among them. And we do have nauseating to describe whatever makes one nauseous.

The curious thing, which I find in no discussion of this distinction: the Oxford English Dictionary has this earliest (now obsolete) meaning for nauseous (1613): “Of a person, the stomach, etc.: inclined to sickness or nausea; squeamish.” Look at that: the word first described people. And according to the OED, nauseous in American usage has applied to people since 1885: “affected with nausea; having an unsettled stomach; (fig .) disgusted, affected with distaste or loathing.” That makes the nauseated/nauseous distinction — if it is one — look tenuous indeed. There are other matters of usage more deserving of attention. Some of them have me climbing the walls. Literally!

This post is an instance of what can happen when I read the comics.

[“Thank you, dear sister . . greatest of all sisters”: not a typo. Just as many a cartoon hand has only four fingers, a cartoon ellipsis may have only two dots. The first edition of the OED gives the earliest meaning of nauseous as “inclined to nausea; fastidious” and does not address American usage.]

Sentences and economics

A memorable, thought-provoking statement:

Sentences are attention economies.

Richard Lanham, Revising Prose (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007).

How to improve writing (no. 49)

One way to improve writing: when you’re composing a bulk e-mail, never forget that you’re composing a bulk e-mail. Here’s the start of a bulk mailing from my union:



An improvement:



Dropping Arial and boldface and the unnecessary first and would like to would also improve things. This e-mail’s first sentence might require all of six words: A Happy New Year to you. I think capitals are better with this wish.

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[It may have been possible to address Walt Whitman as “each and every one of you.” He was large and contained multitudes. This post is no. 49 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

A Times Square record store

[Click for a larger sale.]

A Times Square record store, as seen in the opening montage of the Naked City episode “Turn of Events,” May 12, 1959. Colony Records? King Karol? Dunno.

Elaine and I continue to make our way through Naked City, pausing and “rewinding” at will. Great stories, great cinematography (Jack Priestly), great acting. Is that so-and-so? Yes, it is!

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New York, 1964: record stores

Two hundred blog description lines

The first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — long appeared on this blog as what Blogger calls a blog description line. In May 2010, I found myself unexpectedly caffeine-free and made a new line, keeping the quotation marks that had surrounded Van Dyke’s words. At some point I returned to being caffeinated, mildly so. And I kept changing the line (and saving to a text file), always choosing some word or words or element of punctuation from a post then on the front page. These lines now look like bits of found language, detached from contexts, amusing, banal, evocative, opaque. I like that. Here are the first two hundred:

“Orange crate art was a place to start”
“Now caffeine-free”
“Half the pressure, twice the speed”
“It's my duty to remember”
“An informal atmosphere prevails”
“May vary daily”
“Brooklyn is not expanding”
“Checklists prevnt mistakes”
“Eleventyteen human heartstrings”
“Do your own homework”
“Closer to being Aunt Bee’s age”
“Do externals tend to distract you?”
“Mints, whiskey, a company guitar”
“Hey, whaddaya know? Keats”
“Anacin and tooth powder”
“The museum is imaginary”
“Please keep out ’til 1974”
“Please quote”
“A metaphor for analogy”
“Way too much time studying”
“Hellaciously unfun”
“But this is Monday”
“As omnipresent as phone booths”
“Simply friendly areas”
“Vertical blending”
“Nooks and crannies”
“A relatively small part of the whole”
“You’re gonna be late for bowling”
“Way before my time”
“Schooldays, schooldays, schooldays”
“I’d walk a mile for a Blackwing”
“It’s — well, exhilarating”
“No spoilers here”
“ Have fun”
“We have regional dialects”
“¡¡¡¡¡¡”
“Hello, central”
“Through the customary horn”
“Up-to-date”
“Perfectly grammatical”
“Just some of the props”
“It has a lot of cooking”
“Bienvenidos de nuevo, señores”
“Refining, blending, assembling”
“This is fun”
“Always sauce, never gravy”
“Chin up, Pluto!”
“Darn it all”
“How are you. I am all o.k.”
“Thin drawers in snowy weather”
“Viewer discretion is always advised”
“The Continental Paper Grading Co.”
“Almost certainly apocryphal”
“Waiting for my tag cloud”
“Capital letters”
“The only known copy”
“Cheap!”
“New structures all around”
“Out of red”
“There is one for every purpose”
“See how nice?”
“Definitely, emphatically, yes”
“Contains soybean, wheat”
“Uses no batteries”
“And how”
“15 times faster”
“Makes sense, really”
“Neatly folded”
“Pixels gone wrong”
“Feed your head”
“Served on a classic bun”
“Full of pep”
“Insert imprecations here”
“Graphite-grey”
“Omnivore”
“Er, no, not yet”
“Sheer racket”
“Special offers”
“Fittingly modest”
“Only more so”
“Brief intervals of concentration”
“...”
“Not exhaustive”
“Irresistible, homemade flavor”
“Vague and sophisticated”
“Not for the fainthearted”
“It’s a gathering camp”
“Thanks. Thanks!”
“Fake handwriting”
“Completely unobjectionable”
“Unduly so”
“Ain’t Maxwell House all right!”
“With-it”
“As is”
“With flurries”
“A mirror here and there”
“Stalwart worker”
“A well-stocked kitchen”
“Every fret works”
“Must know what he's talking about”
“Locks in flavor”
“That’ll fool ’em”
“Many things at once”
“Woke up this morning”
“Bright blue weather”
“Brown October”
“Missing the obivous”
“I go to time out for cheating. I am the 99%.”
“With oranges”
“Notary sojac”
“Remote encoding center”
“Are we there yet?”
“Another fine vaudevillian”
“Insignificant little speck on the map”
“Recreational reading”
“Set aside”
“Like living in an apartment building”
“Beauty and function and value”
“Check your local listings”
“Pedantic”
“Fine-grained choices”
“Figurative and literal”
“Activity of thought”
“The picky one”
“Sentences? Paragraphs?”
“Oh, wirra, wirra, wirra”
“Getting stuff done”
“You might like it”
“Eh wot?”
“Clunky”
“Is anything missing?”
“Sufficiently out of the mainstream”
“Semi-tedious”
“Upgrade now”
“Bird thou never wert”
“It’s the extra-dry treat”
“Random miscellaneous company”
“Still working”
“Flecked”
“Open to public”
“Like they say”
“Extracurricular”
“Highly mistaken”
“Motuweth frisas”
“‘Hep’ or ‘with it’”
“Words and phraseology”
“All that”
“No embarrassing ink spills”
“Okay”
“Not word-processing”
“Seems to make sense”
“Repeat as necessary”
“To out of up for”
“Not a trace of bitterness”
“Pocket squirrel: +1”
“Snoot”
“Forward!”
“Things ⁓ what they used to be”
“Write things down”
“Void where prohibited”
“No purchase necessary”
“Fugiad diughiuwr”
“Where things are”
“Noun phrase”
“Real time”
“The weather”
“Very important things”
“Oooh, cutdown”
“Awake”
“Distractions and such”
“The life of my mind”
“We deliver”
“Now what?”
“What a relief”
“Fun, indeed”
“Dubious company”
“Making our own pies now”
“Filmed on location”
“Not best practices”
“Quo, man, quo”
“Egregiously misclassified”
“Delicious, vitalizing”
“Spark-emitting zeal”
“Now with a smaller marquee”
“Fallible”
“Felt and tonic”
“I write everything in here”
“It’s nice to leave the shop”
“Expressing skepticism about the Beloit Mindset List
    since 2010”
“Tomorrow’s spelling today”
“Obviates elaboration”
“I don’t eat light bulbs”
“What is there still to discuss?”
“Preoccupation”
“Alphabetically, it’s autumn”
“Courson Blatz”
“Today’s dizzyingly overfull, warp-speed Internet”
”Not that big of a deal”
“It’s rally, rally, rally cold”
“Surplus energy on the dancing floors”

And as one of these lines asks, “Now what?”

Reading, before and after

I want my children to learn how to learn one thing after another, to accept that there is a before and an after in life. I think reading books is still one of the best ways we have of reminding us of this fact. As Goethe once remarked, “It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once.”

Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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