Roger Angell on Don Zimmer

It’s a short piece at The New Yorker. It begins:

Don Zimmer, who died yesterday at eighty-three, was an original Met and an original sweetie pie. His sixty-six years in baseball were scripted by Disney and produced by Ken Burns. (Grainy black-and-white early footage, tinkly piano, as he marries for life at local home plate in bushy, front-porchy Elmira, New York; smiling baggy-pants young teammates raise bats to form arch.)

Irresistible, right? Even if you know next to nothing about baseball.

Related posts
Roger Angell, notebook man
Roger Angell, “This Old Man”

Roger Angell, notebook man

Roger Angell is a notebook man:

Inside the cabinets above his desk, he has stored what may be his most valuable assets: stacks of the three-subject notebooks he uses while reporting. “Mead notebooks,” he says, “the best notebook in the world. [The New Yorker editor] David Remnick and I talk about how you can’t get anything to replace the Mead notebook, which is unavailable now. They take ink perfectly. There is a great flow. All the other notebooks are coated with something so your pen slides along.” In recent years, when he goes on reporting trips, he has resorted to making use of old Mead notebooks that still have blank pages.

Here (not from the interview) is a photograph of Angell with a notebook. And here (not from the interview) is a photograph of the notebook. Could Angell’s notebook be the not-three-subject 6″ x 9 1/2″ Mead?

Mead still makes three-subject notebooks, including the 6″ x 9 1/2″. Perhaps their quality isn’t what it was.

Related posts
Ron Angell on Don Zimmer
Roger Angell, “This Old Man”

[Found via kottke.org.]

June 6, 1944

[“Somewhere in England, American soldiers of the 9th Army Air Corps advance HQ board an LCT (tank transport) landing craft for the trip to the beaches of Normandy & the Allied invasion of France, aka D-Day.” Photograph by Frank Scherschel. June 6, 1944. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

VDP on songwriting in these times

Van Dyke Parks on songwriting in these times:

Forty years ago, co-writing a song with Ringo Starr would have provided me a house and a pool. Now, estimating 100,000 plays on Spotify, we guessed we’d split about $80. When I got home, on closer study, I found out we were way too optimistic.

Read it all: Van Dyke Parks on How Songwriters Are Getting Screwed in the Digital Age (The Daily Beast).

Related reading
All OCA Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)

Mark Trail revised

[Bear and friends, May 23, 2014. Mark Trail panel, May 15, 2014. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

ASCAP, all caps Why The New York Times spells it Ascap.

A Bryan Garner story

Bryan Garner says that this piece is based on a true story: How polish and attention to detail can win the motion (ABA Journal). Good advice for addressing any audience in writing. I like the dowdy dialogue:

“Jim, good usage isn’t nearly as fluid as you’re suggesting. Besides, I’m talking about current editorial standards. Have you ever heard of Theodore Bernstein or H.W. Fowler?”

Related reading
All OCA Bryan Garner posts (Pinboard)

[Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone.]

ASCAP, all caps

Odd to see The New York Times rendering the acronym for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers as Ascap, especially when the article also mentions — with caps — BMI. But Ascap is Times style, as given in the paper’s Manual of Style and Usage. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate has the acronym in caps, as does ASCAP’s website. Why Ascap, Times?

*

June 5: Why Ascap? The Manual of Style and Usage entry for acronym explains: “When an acronym serves as a proper name and exceeds four letters, capitalize only the first letter: Unesco, Unicef.” But then there’s FERPA. Or is it Ferpa?

Also from Robert Walser

Reading is as productive as it is enjoyable. When I read, I am a harmless, nice and quiet person and I don’t do anything stupid. Ardent readers are a breed of people with great inner peace as it were. The reader has his noble, deep, and long-lasting pleasure without being in anyone else’s way or bothering anyone. Is that not glorious? I should think so!

Robert Walser, “Reading,” in A Schoolboy’s Diary, trans. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2013).

Other Walser posts
From “The Essay”
Robert Walser, Microscripts
Staying small

[I type Wasler for Walser, again and again. Is that not dumb? I should think so! Thanks, Chris.]

From Robert Walser

It’s much prettier, and thus much quicker, and thus much more sensitive and pleasing to write on clean, smooth paper, so always make sure you have good writing paper ready. Why else are there so many stationery stores?

Robert Walser, “The Essay,” in A Schoolboy’s Diary, trans. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2013).

“The Essay” appears in Walser’s first book, Fritz Kocher’s Essays (1904), the collected schoolroom compositions of an imaginary boy.

The more I read of Robert Walser, the more I want to read. His work is uncompromised by any accommodation to reality.

Other Walser posts
Robert Walser, Microscripts
Staying small