Joseph Mitchell, scissors, paper clips

Joseph Mitchell’s labor of writing:

And labor it truly was, as can be readily seen from the few draft examples Mitchell left behind. Seated at the sturdy Underwood typewriter that he would use his entire New Yorker career, Mitchell would patiently cast and recast sentences, sometimes dozens of times, changing just a word or two with each iteration until an entire paragraph came together and seemed right. He would move through his drafting of the story in this slow, painstaking fashion, at certain points (in that pre-computer era) using a scissors to cut these passages apart, sometimes sentence by sentence, and physically rearranging them to get a better feel for the narrative rhythm. In so doing he often used paper clips to hold the sentence strips together, and these constructions would come to resemble a long, flexible washboard or a kind of primitive girdle. All this fussing was exceedingly time-consuming, even for a magazine writer, which helped establish Mitchell’s growing reputation for deliberation.

Thomas Kunkel, Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of “The New Yorker” (New York: Random House, 2015).

I haven’t started to read this book, really: I’ve only dipped in. A biography whose index includes the entry “paper clips used by” is a biography I’m going to like.

Helvetica for résumés?

From Bloomberg Business: “The Best and Worst Fonts to Use on Your Résumé.” The “one consensus winner,” according to this (limited, very limited) survey of design people: Helvetica.

That puzzles me. Even in the world of design, Helvetica is far from a “consensus winner,” as Gary Hustwit’s 2007 film Helvetica makes clear. The typographer Erik Spiekkermann (who appears in the film) has gone so far as to say that Helvetica sucks. He even has a page about it: Helvetica sucks.

One of the best-looking résumés I’ve seen is that of the Harvard faker Adam Wheeler. He used Hoefler Text to put his fabulated accomplishments on paper. Me, I’d prefer a serif — Iowan Old Style, Palatino, Sorts Mill Goudy, Vollkorn, a good serif, sans lies.

A related post
Helvetica, the movie

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.]