Figures of speech

I’m not unwilling to discuss litotes. But I refuse to even mention paralipsis.

Sentence-starting conjunctions

“From at least the time of Chaucer, expert writers have tended to begin 10–20% of their sentences with conjunctions”: Yes, Virginia, you can begin a sentence with a conjunction. Bryan Garner explains: Conjunctions as sentence-starters.

Students often tell me that in past classrooms, the sentence-starting and and but have been off limits. Because too. Good thing no one told Emily Dickinson.

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

Nancy in autumn

[Nancy, 1967. From Brian Walker’s The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s “Nancy” (1988).]

Mists, mellow fruitfulness — yes, it’s a nice season. Linus agrees, though for other reasons.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[I must admit: I have distorted Nancy’s position through selective quoting. In the second panel of this strip Nancy adds, “But not for bubble gum.” Falling leaves stick to her bubbles. The autumnal equinox strikes tonight.]

Film recommendation: Another Year

Writing about Boyhood (dir. Richard Linklater, 2014), Fresca recommended Another Year (dir. Mike Leigh, 2010). Elaine and I watched it last night and found it deeply thoughtful and moving. The less one knows about this film in advance, I think, the better: read a summary of its plot and you might never go near it. It’s a film for grown-ups, with some comedy and much pathos. It moves through the seasons, ending in winter. That is all ye need to know, and all ye are going to get. One more thing: the Hepples make me think of the Ramsays from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. But it’s been a long time since I’ve read To the Lighthouse.

Fresca has also recommended The Way We Get By (dir. Aron Gaudet, 2009), a documentary about three old Mainers on call to go to Bangor International Airport, any time, day or night, to thank American troops as they leave for and return from war. I too can now recommend this film.

[Fresca, what else should we put in our Netflix queue?]

Stellification, for the few

Elaine has written a terrific post about determining musical and artistic value. What she says reminds me of the last lines of John Ashbery’s poem “Syringa”:


[From Houseboat Days (New York: Penguin, 1977).]

Stellification is for the few, and for other people to decide, later. Or as T. S. Eliot said in East Coker (1943), “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Woody Guthrie in New York

“He rode the rails of the BMT. He played (unhappily, but still) for the swells at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center. He married a Martha Graham dancer named Marjorie. He had Yiddish-speaking in-laws, the Greenblatts”: The New York Times reports on Woody Guthrie in New York. My Name Is New York is the title of a book and a 3-CD compilation documenting Woody Guthrie’s life in the city.

[I can’t bring myself to refer to him as just “Guthrie.” It just doesn’t work.]

Janis Joplin in Sing Out!

A photograph of Janis Joplin by David Gahr appears (in tinted form) as a beautiful Forever stamp from the United States Postal Service. You can see the photograph and stamp at David Gahr Photographs.

When I first saw this stamp, I felt a shock of recognition: I knew the photograph right away. It appeared in the September / October 1970 issue of Sing Out! (“The Folk Song Magazine”), the twentieth-anniversary issue, as part of a two-page feature, titled “David Gahr photo essay” and ”for a painted heart.”

[Does anyone else know this?]

“Some stars”

At Lexikaliker, Gunther reaches for einige Sterne, “some stars.”

The logic of “some” seems to be everywhere. In Homer’s Iliad, action comes in threes: three times Patroclus storms the wall of Troy, three times Hector and Achilles run around the sacred city. Some storming, some running. The fourth time, things change.

Bribery is a crime.

[From the Naked City episode “Barefoot on a Bed of Coals,” May 29, 1963. Click for a larger view.]

That’s Dustin Hoffman, in the final episode of Naked City. It was Hoffman’s second appearance on the show, his third on television. What interests me more though is that sign to the left. It taunts the viewer — or at least this viewer, who knows New York City police stations only from outside — through episode after episode. In this final episode, it’s finally readable.


[From a second screenshot: “Bribery is a crime. A person who gives or offers a bribe to any employee of the City of New York, or an employee who takes or solicits a bribe, is guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for 10 years, or by a fine of $4000, or more, or both.”]

The line at the bottom of the sign? It must read “Click for a larger, blurrier view.”

There are now fifty-two Naked City posts in the Orange Crate Art archives. A full deck. But there’s one more to go.

Marion Dougherty’s index cards

[Click any image for a larger view.]

The casting director Marion Dougherty, in the documentary Casting By (dir. Tom Donahue, 2012): “I would keep the three-by-five card. I would put down anything that hit my mind.”

The card for Dustin Hoffman (whose first screen appearance was in an episode of Naked City) notes Bob Duval’s (Robert Duvall’s) judgment that Hoffman is “v.g.” — very good. Notice the name of Blair Brown in the third screenshot. The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd is an Orange Crate Art and Musical Assumptions favorite.

Casting By feels a bit scattered. The film focuses mostly on Dougherty and Lynn Stalmaster, but each is on screen for just seconds at a time. I’d like to see more of and about them, and fewer of the overly predictable sequences of talking directors and stars and brief clips from film after film after film. Even a ten-minute sequence of, say, Dougherty going through cards and talking about actors would have been a priceless addition. The things I took away from watching: the lack of institutional recognition that casting directors receive and the great regard that actors have for good ones.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)
All OCA Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

[Bonus feature: notice the exchange name on Dustin Hoffman’s card. EN: ENdicott.]