“Mistakes were made”

Roy Peter Clark on Chris Christie and the passive voice: How grammar helps craft governor’s image (The Record).

[The Record is the New Jersey newspaper that first reported on the Christie-Fort Lee story.]

Adam Gopnik on Duke Ellington

Ellington was a dance-band impresario who played no better than O.K. piano, got trapped for years playing “jungle music” in gangster nightclubs, and at his height produced mostly tinny, brief recordings.

Sounds like an Amazon troll, but it’s Adam Gopnik, writing about Duke Ellington in The New Yorker (December 23 and 30, 2013). This summary of Ellington’s accomplishments (followed by words of praise) suggests a writer who doesn’t understand Ellington’s accomplishments — as the leader of a highly idiosyncratic ensemble, as an instrumentalist, as a composer, as an early master of the recording studio. Though “tinny” might make sense if Gopnik’s experience of early Ellington is limited to major-label digital remastering.

And that’s the problem: Gopnik’s understanding of his subjects — Ellington and jazz — is limited. That’s a polite way of saying that Gopnik doesn’t know what he’s writing about.

Concerning Louis Armstrong:

He was not just a genius but an irresistible lion. Even the old complaints about his having sold out no longer seem credible: he simply went from making most of the best jazz records ever made to making some of best pop records.

“Most of the best jazz records ever made”: really? What’s glaringly wrong here though is the claim that Armstrong was charged with selling out. The surprise success of “Hello, Dolly!” was, if anything, a cause for celebration among those devoted to pre-rock-and-roll styles of music. (Armstrong dethroned the Beatles.) The real complaint about Armstrong (utterly mistaken, to my mind) was that he was an Uncle Tom, smiling and servile.

Concerning Ellington’s musicians:

The individual players he employed weren’t up-to-date urban players but, often, less sophisticated New Orleans musicians, whose great gift was a distinctly human tone, often achieved with the use of homemade mutes and plungers.

Ahh, primitivism. This claim is, by any measure, false. I can think offhand of just two New Orleans Ellingtonians: Barney Bigard (clarinet) and Wellman Braud (bass), both consummate musicians. Bubber Miley (cornet and trumpet) and Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton (trombone), whose mute and plunger styles were crucial parts of Ellington’s “jungle” sound, were from South Carolina and New York.

Concerning Billy Strayhorn’s contributions:

It’s long been known by fans that many of the most famous “Ellington” numbers are really the arranger Billy Strayhorn’s, including “Take the A Train” and “Chelsea Bridge.”

Strayhorn was a composer and co-composer. Ellington referred to him as his “writing and arranging companion.” The implication here is that knowledge of Strayhorn’s authorship was inside information. That’s nonsense. There are countless live recordings in which Ellington says something along these lines: “And now our theme, Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Take the “A” Train.’” And the A takes quotation marks.

Concerning the way in which Ellington musicians may have created phrases that became material for Ellington compositions:

What [the alto saxophonist] Johnny Hodges was doing in making those new melodies may have been more like the copying errors in ceaseless cell fission than like premeditated decision: as he set to playing the same chord changes over and over, night after night, a lucky error in a note may, one night, have touched another and become an innovation.

Well, Johnny Hodges didn’t make mistakes. But also: I doubt that any improvising musician would recognize in Gopnik’s imaginings a description of how improvisation and composition work.

It’s sad to see such ill-informed writing about music in the magazine that once gave Whitney Balliett a home.

Related reading
All OCA Duke Ellington posts (Pinboard)
Two Bands (The bit of Gopnik’s piece that’s not behind the New Yorker paywall)

[I haven’t yet read Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, the book that Gopnik is reviewing. The pages of Duke I’ve sampled in Google Books read like a pastiche of previous writing on Ellington. I am happy though to see Ellington holding a Mongol pencil on the book’s cover.]

From the local news

Rewriting history on the television this morning: “Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

The fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom, the occasion of that speech, was August 28, 2013.

Related reading
Also from the local news
Also from the local news

Google, auto-enhancing images

[Peanuts, January 1, 1994, with “Auto Enhance” off and on. Makes whites greyer!]

I noticed a strange development a few months ago: images in new OCA posts did not match the originals in color. The problem was especially noticeable with white backgrounds, which turned dingy grey. The changed colors are the result of a Google feature (not bug!) called “Auto Enhance,” and auto-enhance (as I will call it) can be turned off only in Google+. In other words, one must sign up for Google+ to undo changes to photographs uploaded to Blogger (and stored in Google’s Picasa Web Albums).

I have no interest in Google+, and at some point I realized that auto-enhance affected only JPEGs, not PNGs. So I began uploading only PNGs. But yesterday a PNG came out with a sepia tint. I tried getting the image into a post via Flickr — doable but kinda cumbersome. So I reached for a cliché, gritted my teeth, signed up for Google+, and turned off auto-enhance.

The good news: you can delete a Google+ profile and auto-enhance will remain off. At least so far. My mantra: Sign up. Turn off. Drop out.

Note that deleting a Google+ profile does not mean deleting a Google Account. Google blurs the distinction by referring to a Google+ profile as “your entire Google profile.” To delete “your entire Google profile” sounds pretty drastic. But “your entire Google profile” is your Google+ profile. Deleting a Google+ profile deletes a Google+ profile.

Some relevant reading
Delete my Google+ profile (Google Support)
How to disable auto enhance (Picasa Resources)
Stop Google from “fixing” pictures that are loaded through Blogger (Blogger Hints and Tips)

MLK

[“Martin Luther King Jr. (L) greeting demonstrators at the Prayer Pilgrimage.” Photograph by Paul Schutzer. Washington, D.C., 1957. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

From Standford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute:

On 17 May 1957, nearly 25,000 demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for a Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, featuring three hours of spirituals, songs, and speeches that urged the federal government to fulfill the three-year-old Brown v. Board of Education decision. The last speech of the day was reserved for Martin Luther King’s “Give Us the Ballot” oration, which captured public attention and placed him in the national spotlight as a major leader of the civil rights movement.

The text of the speech is here. It makes for interesting reading in a time of increased efforts to suppress voting.

The compleaten angler

From the local news: “A festival in east-central Illinois will soon show off its best anglers and explain why it’s important to eat them.”

Thank you, local news.

Related reading
Also from the local news

A joke in the traditional manner

Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies?

No spoilers. The answer is in the comments.

Related jokes
Santa Claus : Samuel Clemens : Hardy Mums : Bela Lugosi

[“In the traditional manner” means à la my dad.]

Ph.D. debt

“A new crowdsourcing project provides an eye-opening glimpse into the hefty amounts of debt some graduate students take on to pay for their education and how hopeless many of them feel about their prospects for repaying it”: The Cost of a Ph.D. (The Chronicle of Higher Education). The project, in the form of a Google spreadsheet, is here: Ph.D. Debt Survey. It’s a sorrowful thing to read.

Something I said in a post last October: “Borrowing any amount of money to finance graduate work in the humanities is folly.” William Pannapacker’s advice about graduate work in the humanities is simpler: “Just don’t go” — unless you are well-heeled or well-connected or supported by a partner or are earning a credential and your employer is paying. Hard times here and everywhere you go. Times is harder than ever been before.

Winter, ookyook

Winter is ukiuq, or ookyook. Remember ookyook?

“One could have Timofey televised”

[Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957).]

Nabokov seems to have imagined — if only as a horrible pipedream — the end of the classroom and the rise of something MOOC-like. Phonograph records and televisions for all!

Related reading
All Nabokov posts (Pinboard)