LADIES’ RETIRING ROOM

[Click for a larger view and you’ll see the apostrophe: LADIES’.]

The Oxford English Dictionary dates retiring room to 1621: “The Prynce came and wente into his retyringe roomes, and having putt on his roabes went and mett the King.” The term first denoted “a room set aside for seclusion, rest, or quiet.” And “(in later use also) a public toilet.” Retiring room is a polite way to say powder room.

These words appear on the inside men’s-room door in the Orpheum Theatre in Champaign, Illinois. In 1994, the building got a new life as the Orpheum Children’s Science Museum. Our fambly had a private tour many years ago, courtesy of a former babysitter working at the museum. The lobby area then housed the museum, which we called Heather’s Museum. The theater itself was then a pre-restoration wreck. I remember paint peeling from every surface. We stood on the stage and climbed to the projection room and felt very privileged indeed. Thank you, Heather.

This past Saturday the Orpheum Theatre was the setting for a terrific concert by the Prairie Ensemble. The theater itself is now restored — beautiful details everywhere. I am glad that those responsible for the restoration had the good sense to preserve the lettering on this repurposed door.

Dropbox and the plain style

Dropbox has announced changes to its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. From the announcement:

We care about having Terms of Service that are readable, give the right amount of context, and avoid unnecessary legalese, so we’ve updated our language to better match the permissions you give us with the features you use. For example, to provide you with document previews, our automated systems need permission to access and scan your stuff for those previews — so we explain this in the new Terms.

And from the new Terms:

When you use our Services, you provide us with things like your files, content, email messages, contacts and so on (“Your Stuff”). Your Stuff is yours. These Terms don’t give us any rights to Your Stuff except for the limited rights that enable us to offer the Services.

I like the plainness, and I like “Your Stuff.” This writing inspires trust.

If anyone would like to try Dropbox, here’s a referral link. An extra 500 MB for you; an extra 500 MB for me.

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March 2, 2014: Dropbox’s plain Terms of Service ispired more trust on my part than they should have. Here is a good explanation of why a user should opt out of Dropbox’s arbitration procedures. To opt out, click this link and sign in — and soon. After accepting the new Terms of Service, a user has thirty days to opt out.

“Something is missing”

Mr. Compson speaking:

“We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable—Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.”

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

This passage is a compact reader’s guide to the novel: you read and re-read, and, yes, “something is missing.” Something happened: what? In the final 200 pages of the novel (what a novel), Mr. Compson’s son Quentin and Quentin’s Harvard roommate Shreve McCannon will take up the work (or play) of bringing Judith, Bon, Henry, and Sutpen together and providing what’s missing, making something happen, making their own story from the bits of fact and conjecture that have come into their possession about Thomas Sutpen and his family.

Related posts
Faulkner on peace
Faux Faulkner
A Homeric Faulkner simile
Punctuation marks in literature

Roger Angell, “This Old Man”

Roger Angell, writing in The New Yorker about old age:

People my age and younger friends as well seem able to recall entire tapestries of childhood, and swatches from their children’s early lives as well: conversations, exact meals, birthday parties, illnesses, picnics, vacation B. and B.s, trips to the ballet, the time when . . . I can’t do this and it eats at me, but then, without announcement or connection, something turns up. I am walking on Ludlow Lane, in Snedens, with my two young daughters, years ago on a summer morning. I’m in my late thirties; they’re about nine and six, and I’m complaining about the steep little stretch of road between us and our house, just up the hill. Maybe I’m getting old, I offer. Then I say that one day I’ll be really old and they’ll have to hold me up. I imitate an old man mumbling nonsense and start to walk with wobbly legs. Callie and Alice scream with laughter and hold me up, one on each side. When I stop, they ask for more, and we do this over and over.

Roger Angell is ninety-three.

[“This Old Man” shifts in tone again and again, so any excerpt is unrepresentative of the whole. Read the whole.]

More on hyphenating phrasal adjectives

More from Bryan Garner on hyphenating phrasal adjectives. The first installment appeared last week. Helpful, helpful, helpful.

Phrasal adjectives are why I browse in used-book stores.

Domestic comedy

“I wonder if there’s a word for soupmaking, other than soupmaking.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

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)