Thoureauvian Zippy rocks

 
[Zippy  November 29, 2015. First and third panels.]

I like it that the third panel prompts you (or me) to look again for “some rocks.” There they are, back in panel the first. Yow!

Related reading (via Pinboard)
All OCA Nancy posts
All OCA Nancy and Zippy posts (with more rocks)
All OCA Zippy posts

Billy Strayhorn centenary

[“Portrait of Billy Strayhorn, New York, N.Y., between 1946 and 1948.” Photograph by William Gottlieb (1917–2006). From the William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress. Click for a larger view, or visit the Collection for a much larger view.]

William Thomas Strayhorn was born on November 29, 1915. He died on May 31, 1967. Duke Ellington, in his (anti-)autobiography Music Is My Mistress (1973):

He was not, as he was often referred to by many, my alter ego. Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.

Also from that book, an excerpt from what Ellington wrote after Strayhorn’s death:

He demanded freedom of expression and lived in what we consider the most important and moral of freedoms: freedom from hate, unconditionally; freedom from self-pity (even throughout all the pain and bad news); freedom from fear of possibly doing something that might help another more than it might himself; and freedom from the kind of pride that could make a man feel he was better than his brother or neighbor.

His patience was incomparable and unlimited. He had no aspirations to enter into any kind of competition, yet the legacy he leaves, his oeuvre , will never be less than the ultimate on the highest plateau of culture (whether by comparison or not).

God bless Billy Strayhorn.

I am baffled by the apparent absence of Strayhorn programming from Columbia University’s WKCR. Here is a YouTube sampler, with performances by Strayhorn himself, the Ellington band, or assorted Ellingtonians.

“Blood Count” : “Chelsea Bridge” : “The Intimacy of the Blues” : “Johnny Come Lately” : “Lotus Blossom” : “Lush Life” : “My Little Brown Book” : “Rain Check” : “Take the ‘A’ Train” : “U. M. M. G.”

And a website: billystrayhorn.com. And a related post: Strayhorn on humility and individuality.

Familiar phrasing

Elaine and I are back home after ten days visiting family and friends. “Family and friends”: what a bland phrase, so easily trivialized by the abbreviation ’n’ , so easily commodified into a “plan.” And yet the only words we have for our most important human relationships.

Nabokov: Van Veen, eraser

Dr. Van Veen, psychologist, in lecture mode:


Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969).

Nabokov himself famously said that his pencils outlasted their erasers. Not (contra The Atlantic ) in Speak, Memory but in a 1962 interview with unidentified journalists, published in Strong Opinions (1973): “I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Waitin’ with Nancy

[Nancy , November 22, 1945. Via Random Acts of Nancy .]

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Thanksgiving 1915

[“Thanksgiving Revel in Waldorf Barn: Guests Enjoy a New England Farm Dinner and See Country Dances and Corn Husking.” The New York Times, November 24, 1915.]

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Previous Thanksgiving posts
In jail, 1914 : In jail, 1913 : Thanksgiving and mortality : In jail, 1912 : Competitive eating, 1911 : A 1917 greeting card : A found letter : Sing Sing, 1908 : Sing Sing, 1907

Escalators, not over the hill

“The first thing they’d say was, ‘Please tell me you’re keeping the wooden escalators’”: “Macy’s Historic Wooden Escalators Survive Renovation” (The New York Times ).

[Bonus points if you recognize the source of the post title.]

William Maxwell: “the greatest pleasure there is”

The narrator leaves Lincoln, Illinois, to join and his father and stepmother Grace in the big city:


William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980).

Other Maxwell posts
On childhood and familiar objects
On Melville and Cather
On sentences

Robert Walser: “something slight”

No deeds now! Listen, linger, remain rooted to the spot. Be divinely touched by something slight.

Robert Walser, “Tiergarten,” in Berlin Stories , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

The last Mencken post

A Variety headline:

Pash Flaps M. C.
Fan Clubs Rated
Worthless to Theatres
As B. O. Gag.

Quoted in H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States , 4th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936).

Can you figure out what this headline is saying? Mencken gives a paraphrase as it appeared in the Manchester Guardian , January 30, 1930. No spoilers here: it’s in the comments.

Also from The American Language
The American a : The American v. the Englishman : Anglic : “Are you a speed-cop?” : Benjamin Franklin and spelling : B.V.D. : English American English : Franco-American : “[N]o faculty so weak as the English faculty” : On professor : Playing policy : Proper names in America : “There are words enough already” : The -thon , dancing and walking Through -thing and -thin’ : Vaudevillians at play : The verb to contact

[Finally made it to the end of this book.]