More “some rocks”

At Dreamers Rise, Chris has collected “some rocks.” Just great.

Mary Norris on New Yorker style

“What if all these commas and hyphens and subtleties of usage prove to be the products of a benign delusion?” Mary Norris of The New Yorker writes about the house style: “Holy Writ.”

[Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen is forthcoming from W. W. Norton. Want.]

Gotham Book Mart bookmark

[Slightly faded, slightly stained. Heck, it’s just a bookmark.]

A Gotham Book Mart bookmark, probably from somewhere in the 1980s. Leave it to the Gotham to advertise itself by using an exchange name — PLaza 7-0367 — long after the days of exchange names. The art is no doubt the work of Edward Gorey.

On what must have been my last visit to the Gotham’s 47th Street location, my fambly and I ascended to the second floor (I’d never been), to see an exhibit of Edward Gorey’s work. My son the cartoonist was pretty excited. Ben, do you remember that time?

Other bookmarks
Paperback Booksmith (now Brookline Booksmith)
Strand Book Store

Dubble trubble

To enjoy yesterday’s Henry, we must remove from our cultural archives all traces of The Boys from Brazil, The Shining, and Village of the Damned. We must place ourselves in a world in which jobs are advertised on pieces of paper taped to store windows. Also, a world without an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Also, without photocopiers. In the Henry world, copies are made with an A. B. Dick Mimeograph or some second-rate duplicating machine. Perhaps a Dubble?

Here is a wonderful advertisement for A. B. Dick. I like its clarity and conviction:


[Life, November 11, 1940. Click for a larger view and greater conviction.]

A related post
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)
Mimeograph duplicator (another Life ad)

Railing against vogue words

I recently read someone railing against the words insight and insightful. Vogue words! The writer was probably channeling the third (1979) or fourth (1999) edition of The Elements of Style, which says of insightful :

The word is a suspicious overstatement for “perceptive.” If it is to be used at all, it should be used for instances of remarkably penetrating vision. Usually, it crops up merely to inflate the commonplace.

My railer’s ace in the hole: insightful is not in his (1970) dictionary — which might mean that he needs more dictionaries. Webster’s Third had the word in 1961. The Oxford English Dictionary records its first appearance in a 1907 John Galsworthy novel: “As if she had been guilty of thoughts too insightful, Mrs Pendyce blushed.” But widespread use is relatively recent: Google’s Ngram Viewer shows a significant increase in the word’s use between 1960 to 2000. As for insight, it first appears in Middle English circa 1200, as insiht. That’s one long vogue.

When I read or hear this sort of railing against words, I have greater sympathy for the exasperation with which linguists regard prescriptivist attitudes toward language. But not all careful thinking about one’s words is nonsense.

Words I can live without
Bluesy , craft , &c.
Delve , -flecked , &c.
Expressed that
Pedagogy
That said
Three words never to use in a poem

[Searching OCA, I find that I’ve used perceptive just once in ten years. Insightful turns up only in an observation that E. B. White’s preference for perceptive seems arbitrary. I appear to have little affection for either insightful or perceptive. That’s a different matter from an uninformed insistence that a particular word is a newfangled convenience or without lexicographic reality.]

Ellington sings!

The Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine has an article about Duke Ellington’s “Moon Maiden,” a piece written for the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. “Moon Maiden” is to my knowledge the only singing Ellington ever did on record. I know the tune from the 1969 solo version released on the 1977 Pablo LP The Intimate Ellington. There Ellington plays celeste and speaks the lyric. YouTube has a full band version with Ellington singing, most likely also from 1969. Above, Ellington playing and singing as part of ABC-TV’s Apollo 11 coverage. That’s Rufus Jones at the drums.

Though “Moon Maiden” is Ellington’s singing debut, it isn’t his vocal debut. Ellington spoke on the 1934 recording “Saddest Tale.” And in 1951 he narrated “Monologue (Pretty and the Wolf).”

I wonder if Brian Wilson and Mike Love had something to do with the vi-i-i-i-brations in “Moon Maiden.”

Related reading
All OCA Duke Ellington posts (Pinboard)
Five sentences about life on the moon

A joke in the traditional manner

Q. Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money?

No spoilers here. The answer is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect?
How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling?
What did the plumber do when embarrassed?
Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels?
Why did King Kong climb the Empire State Building?
Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies?
Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. Everything here is his except the doctor and Santa Claus.]

Voltaire on intolerance

[“The law of persecution then is equally absurd and barbarous; it is the law of tigers: nay, it even still more savage, for tigers destroy only for the sake of food, whereas we have butchered one another on account of a sentence or a paragraph.” A Treatise upon Toleration, translated by Tobias Smollett, Thomas Francklin, et al. 1764.]

Or a cartoon.

NPR reported this morning that Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance (1763) is a best-selling book in Paris.

[What Voltaire wrote: “Le droit de l’intolérance est donc absurde et barbare: c’est le droit des tigres, et il est bien horrible, car les tigres ne déchirent que pour manger, et nous nous sommes exterminés pour des paragraphes.” Roughly: The right to intolerance is thus absurd and barbaric: it is the right of tigers, and even worse, because tigers rip and tear in order to eat, and we destroy one another over paragraphs. Voltaire’s text may be easily found online.]

Valentine art

Elaine posted the Valentine drawing I made for her. I started with pencil and used a too-old gel pen for the finished drawing. When I tried to erase, the ink smudged. But I liked the way it looked. There’s a circle in the middle of my guitar because it’s a replica National. Okay, that’s enough explanation, he added self-consciously.

Valentine’s Day

[“Heart models.” Photograph by Fritz Goro. March 1948. From the Life Photo Archive.]

I tired of looking at tots on vintage cards and so went looking for something else altogether.

This photograph reminds me of the Webster’s Second definition of heart, which Nabokov quotes in Pnin: “a hollow, muscular organ.” Hollow: but may it be filled with happiness. Happy Valentine’s Day.