Ballad of the spam mail

I taught Langston Hughes’s “Ballad of the Landlord,” walked back to my office, checked my mail. In the spam folder: two eviction notices. That’s a new low in spam.

Why is it the ballad of the landlord, when twenty of the poem’s thirty-three lines are spoken by a tenant? Because it’s the landlord’s story that the poem tells. It’s the landlord’s world, so to speak: we just live in it, or get evicted from it. The poem's primary speaker ends up in a newspaper headline as a “Negro” serving ninety days in jail. No headline about the dilapidated condition of the landlord’s property.

And by the way, landlord is such a strange word for use in a democratic society, isn’t it?

“Ballad of the Landlord” has a famous place in the history of American teaching: in 1965 the writer Jonathan Kozol was fired from his job as a Boston substitute-teacher after teaching the poem to fourth-graders. According to Kozol’s principal, the poem “could be interpreted as advocating defiance of authority.” The principal also deemed Kozol lacking in “the personal discipline to abide by rules and regulations, as we all must in our civilized society.” That’s the language of the Boston Public Schools in quotation marks. Kozol tells the story in his first book, Death at an Early Age (1967).

Adam and Libby (Naked City)

[“Portrait of a Painter,” Naked City, January 10, 1962. Click for a larger view.]

As Detective Adam Flint (Paul Burke) gets the latest info on a murder investigation, his girlfriend Libby Kingston (Nancy Malone) is — is doing what, exactly?

The phone call runs for two minutes and forty seconds, the scene shifting between Libby’s apartment and headquarters. The call is interrupted three times, when Detective Frank Arcaro looks for an eraser (!) and talks with Lieutenant Mike Parker, and when Mike takes another call. Finally, Adam asks, “Honey, I don’t mean to be nosy, but what are you doing?” And Libby explains:

“I was a seed. And I grew up through the earth into a beautiful flower. And I lived through the summer, and I let the sun soak through me. And I let the rains wash my face. And then autumn came, and I grew cold, and then winter came, and I went back into the earth again to become a new seed and to wait for another spring.”

That’s one mystery solved, utterly unrelated to the plot, utterly wonderful. There’s nothing else like Naked City.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

Naked City mystery guest

He plays a painter, Roger Barmer, in the Naked City episode “Portrait of a Painter” (January 10, 1962). Can you identify him?

I don’t want to make things too difficult. One more:


[Click either image for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

“Greenwich Village Today” (Naked City)

[“Portrait of a Painter,” Naked City, January 10, 1962. Click for a larger, artier view.]

I’m unable to make a positive i.d., but I’m confident that the man in the white shirt is the show’s producer, Herbert B. Leonard, in beatnik drag. None of the people in this opening shot are credited on the episode’s IMDb page.

I love the screen title. And notice the painting of the thumb. Someone was having fun here.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

Ambassadors are us

The news that President Obama has nominated major (and majorly unqualified) donors for ambassadorships is disillusioning. It seems to be business as usual, or worse than usual. You can read more about it in this PBS NewsHour report.

Fair is fair: if the Obama administration is rewarding major donors in this way, it should be willing to recognize donors of modest means as well. (I write as one of them.) Time-share ambassadorships, a week per year per donor, are the obvious answer. Each share-holder would bring a fresh perspective to the work and learn in the best of all possible ways — on the job.

To anyone at whitehouse.gov: Se habla español, despacio. And I’ve never been to Argentina.

Thank you, local news

On the television just now: the local news informs me that salt will work to melt ice but only on treated roads. In other words, if there’s no salt applied, the salt won’t work. Thank you, local news.

Also from the local news
Anglers, getting eaten : People, getting older : The sun, setting

Orange soda-label art

Howdy was the brainchild of Charles Leiper Grigg, who went on to create 7 Up. Yes, before there was a Seven-Up Company, there was a Howdy Corporation.

I found this label (dented, discolored, slightly torn) in an antiques “mall.” This label spoke to me. It said “Certified Artificial Color.” And then it said “Howdy.” Or “ ‘Howdy.’ ”

Howdy, reader.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange car art : 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 tree art : Orange Tweed art

[Or is it orange-soda label art? Your choice.]

Word of the day: nivosity

The Oxford English Dictionary ’s Word of the Day is nivosity. A new way to hate the weather!

*

February 18: Alas, the OED no longer keeps these links active. There’s more about nivosity in the comments.

Henry, television

[Henry, February 15, 2014.]

This is what a television looks like.

I like Henry for its clarity of line, quiet comedy, and bold anachronism. Gum machines line the streets. Shoes get fixed while u wait. Drawers have no slides. People buy liverwurst and Magic Song Restorer. And they get their vacuum cleaners from door-to-door salesmen.

Today’s Henry shows a world that includes television. But the strip must be from the early days of TV, before people (or parents) determined that sitting too close to the set was Bad For Your Eyes. (How often I heard that warning as a kid.) Then again, sitting close may pose no special danger for cartoon children. Linus van Pelt was sitting up close in 1970, with no apparent harm. And it’s a good thing, because cartoon children must sit close to the screen: sitting up close, in profile, establishes the scene with perfect economy, as stylized as ancient Egyptian art. If Henry were to sit farther back, there wouldn’t be much room left for a story. Look:


[Henry revised, February 15, 2014.]

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

[I read Henry online via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.]

Blogger’s fuzzy-image problem

Blogger has an annoying habit of turning images fuzzy. In my experience, the problem is most noticeable with larger images of text.

I found a solution in a comment on a post about the problem: to remove the fuzz, find /s400/ in the code for the image and change it to /s1600/. Smaller images appear to load with two instances of /s1600/; larger images, with one /s1600/ and one /s400/. Look at the difference. First, with /s400/, notice the fuzziness of the letter forms:



With /s1600/ twice, everything’s clear:



It’s disappointing that Google would set a default that degrades images. But I’m happy to have found a way around the problem.

Something odd: the fuzz is much worse when previewing a post:



Odder still: if you click to enlarge a fuzzy image, you get a clear one. Go figure.

A related post
Google, auto-enhancing images

[Clicking to enlarge won’t sharpen the image of Yeats’s name: that’s a screenshot from Preview, permanently fuzzed. Clicking will sharpen the first image of the poem.]