Typewriter keys

[Photograph by Ralph Steiner, 1921, printed 1945. From the Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

I found these keys while browsing the Library of Congress’s photographs, prints, and drawings. It was only after I decided to post the photograph here that something occurred to me: the fractions that can be properly represented in HTML are relatively few, as was the case in typewriter days. HTML gives us ½, ¼, ⅛. But then there’s 1/16. Making Slow Progress.

Word of the Day: epistling

The Oxford English Dictionary ’s Word of the Day is the noun epistling:

Chiefly literary or humorous. Now rare.

The action or practice of writing letters; (also) epistolary matter, correspondence.

The earliest recorded use is from Thomas Nashe’s Haue with you to Saffron-Walden (1596): “Heere’s a packet of Epistling, as bigge as a Packe of Woollen cloth.” That’s some bigge correspondence.

Related reading
All OCA letters posts (Pinboard)

Shan’t

[Pickles, April 29, 2015.]

Or she may have been reading Bryan Garner, who has a story about shan’t.

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on April 29, 1899. From the (anti-)autobiography Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973):

“Duke” is not the only nickname I’ve had or enjoyed. Because I was such a good second-baseman, I was nicknamed “Otto” after the great Otto Williams. That was just the first of a long string of sobriquets — “Cutey,” “Stinkpot,” “Duke,” “the Phoney Duke” … Doc Perry called me “Wucker,” and Sonny Greer, who brought me to New York and told me not to look at the high buildings, called me “The Kid.” Juan Tizol’s wife called me “Apple Dumpling.” Johnny Hodges’ wife called me “Dumpy,” and Cootie still calls me “Dump.” It was Louis Bellson who started calling me “Maestro.” Cress Courtney called me “Pops,” and my son, Mercer, calls me “Pop” and “Fathoo.” Sam Woodyard called me “Big Red,” Chuck Connors called me “Piano Red,” and Ben Webster used to tell people to “See the ‘Head Knocker.’” Haywood Jones, of the dance team of Ford, Marshall, and Jones, calls me “Puddin’.” Richard Bowden Jones, my man, my real man, called me “Governor” at the beginning of the Cotton Club days. Herb Jeffries cut it short to “Govey.” And a lot of friends and relations in Washington, D.C., still call me “Elnm’t’n”!

WKCR is playing Ellington all day.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

A hashtag of possible interest

It’s #BaltimoreCoverageYouMayNotSee.

Baltimore questions

I’ve written nothing here about events in Baltimore or Nepal. No one needs a post here to be reminded of the first noble truth.

But I want to voice three questions about Baltimore. The observer effect can work in non-scientific contexts too: the act of observation can change what’s observed (as when a principal visits a classroom). Is live television coverage in Baltimore meant to help bring about the violence that we now see on CNN? Is it too cynical to acknowledge that broadcasting such stuff serves broadcasters’ interests? And is it too cynical to suspect that broadcasting such stuff serves to strengthen a larger narrative about color and criminality?

Part of what makes me ask these questions is the constant commentary on CNN yesterday about what “they” were doing: "Now they’re looting”; “Now they’re throwing rocks.” Those statements make me recall the stranger who turned to Elaine as we left a store and whispered conspiratorially, “They’re everywhere” — meaning people of color. (There had been two women of color in line in the store.) Elaine was too stunned to give the stranger a piece of her mind.

As my high-school contemporary-politics teacher Albert Kornblit always reminded us, it’s smart to be wary of anyone who refers to people as “they” and “them” — and that includes CNN.

A joke in the traditional manner

What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist?

No spoilers. The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : 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? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : 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. He must take credit for all but the doctor and Santa Claus.]

Blond and blonde

Merrill Perlman explains the difference, if there is one, between blond and blonde.

The difference seems to figure in Frank O’Hara’s work, as Joe Le Sueur points out: “All of a sudden all the world / is blonde” (“Poem”); “a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond)” (“Personism: A Manifesto”).

A related post
A review of Joe LeSueur’s Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara

[Roi: LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka.]

Tech scamming

“It was an educational exchange, to say the least”: Lenny Zeltser recorded a conversation with a tech-support scammer. Forewarned is forearmed.

[Via Daring Fireball.]

Lear // semiotics / Casablanca

If you’ve had the experience of happening upon old notes whose reason for being is beyond recovery, you will understand my interest in what follows. It’s in my hand, all caps, fountain pen on a strip of unruled paper, 4″ × 8½″:

Lear

semiotics / Casablanca
Mythologies

imagination / reality
    Hopis
    Eskimos

    cockadoodledoo    mkgnao: Ulysses cat
    cocorico = French
    kykeliky = Norwegian “kee ka lee kee”

    bowwow
    vovvov = Norwegian “vahv vahv”
    гав гав= Russian “gahv gahv”

    mouse says “ruff ruff” to cat who
    says “meow” — shows her kids the
    benefit of learning a foreign language

Didion: The White Album

This page is, of course, related to teaching. But why these items appear together is beyond me. I’ve taught Umberto Eco’s essay on Casablanca and Roland Barthes’s Mythologies . I think I once taught Joan Didion’s The White Album too. My daughter Rachel has my copy of that book. Mkgnao is what the Blooms’ cat says in James Joyce’s Ulysses. The mouse that scared away the cat is an old joke; I don’t know where I picked it up.