RZ, i.m.

[Lines from the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem “With a guitar. To Jane.” The guitar that Shelley gave to Jane Williams is in the Bodleian Library. All details there.]

This post is in memory of my friend Rob Zseleczky, who died at this time two years ago. He was a guitarist, and a poet, and his favorite poet was Shelley. We toasted to Rob’s memory last year on this night, and we’ll toast to his memory again tonight.

“In the Nostalgia District”

Mike Brady has been out looking for Marcia’s diary, which little Cindy donated to a book drive. Oops. But Mike is making progress: “It’s at one of the used-book stores downtown,” he says. ”I don’t know which one. I’ve checked a number of them.” And he still has “a handful,” as he puts it, to go. Such a handful that he and Carol divide them up to continue the search.

Where do these people live? Their townful of books reminds me of Roz Chast’s cartoon “In the Nostalgia District.”

A related post
Canned Heat and the Brady Bunch (No kidding)

[Dialogue from The Brady Bunch episode “The Possible Dream,” February 27, 1970.]

iPhoto lives

If you prefer Apple’s iPhoto to the new Photos app (as I do), you should know that it’s still possible to use iPhoto in OS X 10.10.3.

iPhoto 9.6 will not open in 10.10.3, nor can the app be updated in the App Store. (The circle-with-slashed-line on the iPhoto icon makes the app’s status clear.) As 9.6 is unusable, I felt no fear about deleting it. I then opened the App Store app, clicked on Purchases, found iPhoto in the list of purchased apps, and clicked to install. And now I have iPhoto 9.6.1, which works with 10.10.3.

Proceed at your own risk. All I am saying is that I found it possible to bring back iPhoto. Why I never saw an update notification for 9.6.1 is a question for which I have no answer. A check of the Internets suggests that many Mac users have that same question. A cynic might suspect that Apple is trying to move its users to Photos, no questions asked.

Recently updated

Purée Mongole Now with a photograph.

Pencil and paper

Khoi Vinh recently surveyed designers about the tools they use. He has now posted preliminary findings. The most common response to the question “What is your primary tool for brainstorming/ideation?”: pencil and paper.

Word of the day: gazype

[Speaking with Larry Williams (Robert Armstrong), Dan Healy (James Gleason) expresses skepticism in a colloquial manner.]

Elaine and I just went on a pre-Code tear, watching six films in Universal’s Pre-Code Hollywood Collection. The word gazype makes an appearance in the last film of the set, Search for Beauty (dir. Erle C. Kenton, 1934). Dan Healy is doubtful about Larry Williams’s scheme for a health-and-beauty magazine:

“Hey, look, you say this is on the up-and-up? Well, I don’t want to spit in no cop’s eye. If you’re hooked up with this, there's some kind of a gazype in it.”

Gazype appears to fly under all radar. But the Oxford English Dictionary has a word that could be its inspiration: the slang gazump, also spelled gasumph, gazoomph, gazumph, gezumph. As a transitive verb: “To swindle; spec. to act improperly in the sale of houses, etc.” And as a noun: “a swindle.” One citation suggests that it’s a Yiddish word, but “origin uncertain,” says the Dictionary.

The first citation for the verb is from 1928:

“Gazoomphing the sarker” is a method of parting a rich man from his money. An article is auctioned over and over again, and the money bid each time is added to it.

The first citation for the noun is from 1932:

Ere ’e is . . . parasitin’ on people all day  . . .  and then ’e objects to a little gasumph!

As Dan Healy uses the word, it seems to mean crookedness, fishiness. Was gazump well enough known that gazype would get a laugh, with Healy out of his depth in an attempt to use the lastest slang? Was gazype a fleeting variation on gazump? Or an Americanized version of British slang? Did a writer or actor pick up the word in England and misremember it? And is there no end to unanswerable questions?

Other pre-Code posts
Baby Face : Lady Killer : The Little Giant : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Other Men’s Women : Red-Headed Woman

Purée Mongole

The now-defunct-in-the-States Mongol is my favorite pencil, so when Sean at Contrapuntalism broke the news that the Mongol pencil was named for is said to have been named for purée Mongole, I knew that I would have to try that soup. I didn’t know that I would be the one making it or that it would be so easy to make.

Purée Mongole seems to have taken many forms over time. The only thing that seems certain is that the soup was once, as we now say, “a thing,” served in posh restaurants. I followed Henri Charpentier’s recipe, as adapted by Deana Sidney. The soup that results is spectacular. It’s really two soups — one green, creamy, mellow; the other tangy with curry powder and tomato. I took Deana’s suggestion to spoon the red into a bowl of green. A delicious Rorschach test will result.


[This photograph is from the next day’s leftovers. I see Africa, sort of. That’s Madagascar on the lower right. The red in last night’s bowl looked remarkably like Howard Johnson’s Simple Simon logo. You have to trust me on “delicious.” I am no food stylist.]

A few details: I used frozen vegetables, canned navy beans, chicken stock, and Amontillado. Two tablespoons, not a cask. No cream: with whole milk, the soup is plenty rich. With good bread and apple pie, it was dinner.

Thanks to Elaine for moral support and guidance in the art of the puree.

*

June 15: As Faber made clear in a 1971 article for Fortune (“What Happened When I Gave Up the Good Life and Became President”), the story behind the Mongol name is apocryphal. I have revised accordingly. Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for the reference.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol pencil posts (Pinboard)

A Bryan Garner tweet

Good piece by M. Leddy. A missing hyphen gets me hot under the collar. Adding all editors, you have global warming. http://t.co/IrVq4e28na

— Bryan A. Garner (@BryanAGarner) June 11, 2015

Yep, I’m happy.

Ornette Coleman (1930–2015)

The New York Times has an obituary: “Ornette Coleman, Jazz Innovator, Dies at 85.”

For beginners, four recordings from 1959 and 1960: “Lonely Woman,” “Ramblin’,” “Una Muy Bonita,” “Beauty Is a Rare Thing.” These recordings put me in mind of what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in “Plato; or the Philosopher”:

This perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by any thing short-lived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits. How Plato came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost literature, is the problem for us to solve.

The sound of the Ornette Coleman Quartet came to be the sound of jazz.

From Moby-Dick

Herman Melville knew snug . From Moby-Dick (1851):

Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

[Impossible to dispatch this novel in one two-hour class meeting and maintain intellectual integrity.]