Naked City mystery guest

[“Without Stick or Sword,” Naked City, March 28, 1962.]

That’s Maung Tun, a Burmese sailor in New York. But who is he really? Your best guesses are welcome in the comments.

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All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

A Gregg Toland moment (Naked City)

[“Without Stick or Sword,” Naked City, March 28, 1962.]

Jack Priestly, the principal cinematographer for the television series Naked City, was an ace. The cockatoo in this shot must be one master’s homage to another.


[Citizen Kane, 1941. Cinematography by Gregg Toland. Click either image for a larger view.]

The cockatoo turns up in Libby Kingston’s apartment in another episode, off to the side, perched on a shelf.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)
King’s Row, another Toland homage

[Yes, the Kane cocaktoo is eyeless. It’s a glitch.]

The Atlantic on social fraternities

The Atlantic has a long report by Caitlin Flanagan, The Dark Power of Fraternities. An excerpt:

Clearly, the contemporary fraternity world is beset by a series of deep problems, which its leadership is scrambling to address, often with mixed results. No sooner has a new “Men of Principle” or “True Gentlemen” campaign been rolled out — with attendant workshops, measurable goals, initiatives, and mission statements — than reports of a lurid disaster in some prominent or far-flung chapter undermine the whole thing. Clearly, too, there is a Grand Canyon–size chasm between the official risk-management policies of the fraternities and the way life is actually lived in countless dangerous chapters.

The student whose story begins this article, the guy who tried to shoot a bottle rocket out of his — well, he made a cameo appearance here in 2012.

Related reading
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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.

*

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.

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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.”

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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).