Declaration punctuation

“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”: followed by a comma, or a period? The New York Times reports on a question of punctuation in the Declaration of Independence.

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Seymour Barab (1921–2014)

Our dear friend Seymour Barab has died at the age of ninety-three. Seymour was a composer and cellist. A page at his website describes his life and work in detail.

For many years now Elaine and I have visited Seymour and Margie King Barab in New York every summer. We have spent hours with them, in their apartment and at Seymour’s favorite restaurant, listening and learning and realizing just how fortunate we are to know these wonderful people as our friends. Last summer we watched a performance of Seymour’s No Laughing Matter, a one-act opera for performance by children. How lucky these children were to perform with the composer in the audience. How generous he was in appreciating their effort. Seymour was a man of surpassing intelligence and — much more importantly — surpassing kindness. I miss him with all my heart.


[Seymour Barab and Margie King Barab, waiting at a red light. New York, May 2012. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

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9:50 p.m.: Elaine shares some memories in this aptly titled post: The Kindest Man in the World.

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July 10: The New York Times has an obituary for Seymour.

Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture

An Art Institute of Chicago exhibit I had to sample, if only for about half a minute: Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture. I’ll quote from the museum’s page for the installation:

Installed in an enclosed, darkened space, Clown Torture consists of two rectangular pedestals, each supporting two pairs of stacked color monitors (one turned upside down, one turned on its side); two large, color-video projections on facing walls; and sound from all six video displays. . . . In “No, No, No, No (Walter),” the clown incessantly screams “No!” while jumping, kicking, or lying down; in “Clown with Goldfish,” he struggles to balance a fish bowl on the ceiling with the handle of a broom; in “Clown with Water Bucket,” he repeatedly opens a door that is booby-trapped with a bucket of water, which falls on his head; and finally, in “Pete and Repeat,” he succumbs to the terror of a seemingly inescapable nursery rhyme: “Pete and Repeat are sitting on a fence. Pete falls off. Who’s left? Repeat.” Of his work, Nauman has said, “From the beginning I was trying to see if I could make art that . . . was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better, like getting hit in the back of the head. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down. . . . The kind of intensity that doesn’t give you any trace of whether you’re going to like it or not.” Clown Torture functions in very much this way: as an assault on viewers’ aural and visual perception.

As I said: about half a minute. Such art doesn’t interest me — or interest me enough to want to get interested. What interests me more is that the Art Institute has no qualms about requiring one of its guards to stand watch over Clown Torture, listening to tape loops of screams, crashes, and nursery rhymes. That seems to me like torture itself. I don't think any museum employee should be subjected to the noise of this installation, for any length of time. And yes, I’ve told the Art Institute that.

[The first ellipsis in the quoted material is mine.]

Some rocks — old!

At Lexikaliker, an amazing discovery: a 1556 woodcut of “some rocks.” “Some rocks” is one of the delightful details of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy. And “some rocks” is for me something of a a harmless obsession. Harmless so far.

Thanks, Gunther, for sharing your discovery.

Recently updated

No Now with a working link to twenty ways to say “No.”

Thanks, Gunther.

At the Art Institute of Chicago

The most exciting things at the Art Institute of Chicago right now: not the big Magritte exhibit but the photographs of Josef Koudelka and the weavings of Ethel Stein. The first exhibit is in black and white; the second, in color, many colors.

Reality, in my experience, trumps surrealism every time. Witness this Koudelka photograph.

And here’s a short film about Stein: Ethel Stein, weaver.

[Wallace Stevens: “The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover.” (Materia Poetica, 1940). I don’t mean to pit artist against artist. I’m only pointing out that I found work of much greater interest in the quieter areas of the museum.]

Archive and ark

It occurred to me when Elaine and I were in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago: the nouns archive and ark both have to do with containing and protecting. They must have a common origin. Right?

No, not right.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives this etymology for archive :

French archif, archive, < late Latin archīum, archīvum, < Greek ἀρχεῖον magisterial residence, public office, < ἀρχή government

And for ark:

Common Germanic: with Old English arc (earc, ærc, erc, erk), accusative arce, compare Old Frisian erke, Old High German archa, modern German arche, Old Norse örk (genitive arkar), Swedish, Danish ark, Gothic and Germanic arka, probably < Latin arca chest, box, coffer

What about arche- of, say, archetype? From the Greek ἀρχι-, first.

And arch?

< Old French arche < Latin arca chest, coffer; also, through some confusion, used in Old French for arc < Latin arcum bow

So it’s arch and and ark that share an ancestor. And stranger still: the OED gives “archive” as one of the meanings of arch: “The civile law . . . was laid up . . . in their Arches.”

I want to go back to Los Angeles, before I had time to look up this stuff.

Naked City TL

Lieutenant Mike Parker (Horace McMahon) is on the telephone with Chief of Detectives Hank Mulvaney (Paul Larsen). It’s serious business:

“Before we get to that, Mike, I’ve got a TL for you.”

A what?

“A what?”

My thoughts exactly.

“That’s what my kids call them, a TL. I don’t know what the letters stand for, but it means that I’ve got a compliment for you if you can dig up something nice to say about me.”

But they turn to the more serious matter. This bit of dialogue, from the Naked City episode “Man without a Skin” (February 6, 1963), sent me off running. TL stands for trade-last. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word in this way:

n. U.S. a compliment offered in exchange for one that is directed towards the speaker; also, in weakened sense, a compliment, whether reciprocal or not

On these terms, a TL is might be something like “Oh, I like your hat too.” Webster’s Third gives a more limited and more interesting meaning:

n -s : a complimentary remark by a third person that a hearer offers to repeat to the person complimented if the latter will first report a compliment made about the hearer

I like this definition, which suggests fabrication, hearsay, and the extortionist element in youthful apologizing: I’ll apologize to you if you’ll apologize to me first. Two of the six OED citations for trade-last suggest reciprocity, but none suggest the you-first element of the Webster’s definition. Does “offered in exchange” in the OED definition mean “given in exchange,” or “promised in exchange”? Did trade-last come to have a much more limited meaning in mid-century U.S. culture? Beats me. But kids — somebody’s kids — have been giving TLs for a long time. The OED dates the word to 1891.

There are forty-seven Naked City posts in Orange Crate Art. This has been one of them.

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Foreign Correspondent Mongol

[From Foreign Correspondent (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1940. Click for larger views.]

Stebbins (Robert Benchley) is a do-nothing foreign correspondent. By the end of the film, he’s reduced to taking dictation. But at least he has a good pencil to work with. Yes, that’s a Mongol.

And if you’re skeptical, I’ll quote my wife Elaine Fine: “The important thing is that we know it’s a Mongol.” The ferrule gives it away.

Foreign Correspondent is available from the Criterion Collection, beautifully restored. The second of these screenshots though comes from YouTube: my library’s DVD is already damaged, and VLC won’t play the entire film.

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All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)

Pocket notebook sighting: Foreign Correspondent

My affection for Foreign Correspondent (1940) is at least partly a matter of its being my first Alfred Hitchcock film, or one of the first. (Thanks, television.) Foreign Correspondent might not be a great Hitchcock film, but it’s a good one. It has strong overtones of The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938): war clouds, episodic boy-meets-girl plot (Joel McCrea, Laraine Day), an unnamed foreign power, double agents, an endangered oldster. Herbert Marshall and George Sanders are the most distinguished of the players, the later as Scott ffolliott (the capital F was removed to honor of a beheaded ancestor). ffolliott gets the film’s best line: “Cancel my rumba lesson.” Foreign Correspondent also has something relatively unusual for a Hitchcock film: compelling special effects. This notebook though is not one of them.


[Click for a larger view. But you’ll have to watch to figure it out.]

Two things I thought about while watching the film the other night:

Once war breaks out, the film leaves the oldster Van Meer (Albert Basserman) behind. There’s no happy reunion, as there is with Mrs. Froy (Dame May Whitty) in The Lady Vanishes). Van Meer’s day — when war might have been averted — is past.

The tactics that the enemy uses, and which the film depicts as barbarous — bright light, loud music, sleep deprivation — were to become the stuff of American military interrogation.

Foreign Correspondent is available from the Criterion Collection, beautifully restored, with lots of extras.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : The Woman in the Window