Domestic comedy

“You know, if you grow up with one version of something, any other version is going to strike you as ersatz.”

“Even if it’s the original. Put that on your blog.”

We were talking about the television series Lassie. The Lassie of my childhood is the Timmy-Ruth-Paul version. I’ve never really cottoned to the Jeff-Ellen-Gramps version, which came first. Indeed, without Jeff-Ellen-Gramps, there’d be no Timmy-Ruth-Paul: Timmy came on the scene as a runaway orphan hiding in the Jeff-Ellen-Gramps barn. Ruth and Paul bought the farm from Ellen and adopted the runaway. COZI TV is running four hours of Lassie this afternoon, two hours of which are Timmy-Ruth-Paul.

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All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
All OCA Lassie posts (Just a handful)

[Did you know that before there was June Lockhart, there was Cloris Leachman? She was a tightly wound Ruth Martin, something like the Phyllis Lindstrom of just-outside-Calverton.]

More adventures in sardines

Emboldened by my happy experience with a tin of King Oscar Mediterranean Style sardines (thanks again, Martha), I decided to try a tin of King Oscar with Hot Jalapeño Peppers. Lord have mercy. Other exclamations, too. The combination of heat and smoke (“smoked in real oak-wood ovens”) makes for a surprising, delightful adventure. These sardines make me remember the midwestern characterization of anything unusual: “That’s different.” Yes, different — and good. King Oscar with Hot Jalapeño Peppers: the avant-garde of the sardine world.

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All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[“Hot jalapeño” is redundant, no? Perhaps it’s to protect the company from complaints. But “real oak-wood ovens”: as opposed to pretend ovens? Image from King Oscar. Thank you, Your Majesty.]

Walking on clouds with Nancy

[Nancy, June 30, 1949. Click for a larger view.]

I, too, am walking on clouds today, giddy and more than slightly in a trance. After thirty years of teaching, I’m retiring. All semester long, I’ve been feeling like Bunny Colvin: “Five months to my thirty.” And then four, three, two, one — and none. Three final examinations next week, and I’m done.

Last things:

The final scene of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), which ended a look at films that owe something to Homer’s Odyssey. Tramp returning, intuitive understanding: it’s the Odyssey.

The streamside scene from the Father Knows Best episode “Betty’s Graduation,” in a class that began with Gilgamesh. There is no permanence.

In an American lit class, the end of chapter 6 of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin. I am leaving academic life in very different circumstances from those of poor Timofey Pnin. What moves me most in these pages (which I read aloud): after a cracking sound, Pnin’s aquamarine glass bowl, a gift from his not-son Victor, lies not broken at the bottom of his kitchen sink. It’s a goblet that broke. The bowl still has its integrity, as Pnin has his.

I’ll have more to say about teaching and not teaching. But not now, not yet.

A secret message to friends

Thank you, Kathy and John David, for a wonderful time last night. In the internal combustion engine of life, you two are mighty pistons. Vroom, vroom!

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.

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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.

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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.

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All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)