“Lush Life” plus

Chris Albertson (writer, producer, Bessie Smith biographer) has posted the 1964 recording of Billy Strayhorn performing “Lush Life.” But it’s a recording with a difference: preceding the performance is a conversation between Duke Ellington and the radio personality William B. Williams. As their conversation makes clear, this performance was being broadcast on WNEW. Oh 1964 airwaves.

Related reading
Billy Strayhorn centenary

Days and shootings

In the United States in 2015, mass shootings are outnumbering the days of the year: 336 days, 355 mass shootings. And we still do not have a majority of legislators willing to stand up to the NRA and enact stricter gun-control laws.

A wrongheaded “dead words” movement

“The goal is livelier writing. The result can be confusion”: “‘Use More Expressive Words!’ Teachers Bark, Beseech, Implore” (The Wall Street Journal ).

Removing empty words such as really from formal prose is a good thing. But for teachers to ban, say, I , it , said , see , walk , and why as “dead words”: that way madness lies. Such teachers fail to understand that putting in “better” words is not the way to better writing, and that plain words typically offer the most intelligent way to say what needs to be said. Dressing up in an awkward costume doesn’t make a writer look smart. It makes a writer look awkward — and dumb. Did I peruse the tome? No, I read the book.

The dumbness of one board of education’s “Said is Dead” list may be seen in its details: spieled , whistled , and verbalized, for instance, are preposterous substitutes for said. And miffed is not a substitute at all. (“Dumb list,” he miffed.) At least they were smart enough to leave out ejaculated .

From The Elements of Style, fourth edition:

Inexperienced writers not only overwork their adverbs but load their attributives with explanatory verbs: “he consoled,” “she congratulated.” They do this, apparently, in the belief that the word said is always in need of support, or because they have been told to do it by experts in the art of bad writing.

Note especially the last sixteen words.

Related posts
Beware of the saurus : Ending a sentence with it

Nabokov: “Dixon Pink Anadel!”

Dr. Van Veen has been summoned to England to investigate a “teasy problem,” “a singular case of chromesthesia” in one Spencer Muldoon, forty, and blind from birth:


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

I first thought that Anadel might be an invented anagram (it’s that kind of novel), but Anadel Colored Pencils were a genuine Dixon product.

Has any writer had more to say about pencils than Nabokov? I don’t think so.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Henry hat

[Henry , December 2, 2015.]

It’s been a long time since I last saw a pirate hat made of newspaper. Or, more lawfully, a sailor hat. I am happy to know that this hat is still a “thing.”

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

A note to the Google Maps lady

It’s “Easton, Pennsylvania,” not “Easton Pa.” Pa is down at the Crayola factory, picketing to bring back Raw Sienna.

At the Museum of the City of New York

After just two visits, the Museum of the City of New York, or the City Museum, has become one of our household’s favorite museums. We visited last week for the Folk City and Jacob Riis exhibits. A surprise: an exhibit of photographs by Carl Van Vechten. One reason I like smaller museums: they change the pace of museum-going. With less schlepping about, I find it easier to take my time. Elaine and I spent a good two-and-a-half hours in the Museum and could easily have spent more. (There are at least seven other exhibits now on view, three of which we had already seen.)

Even getting around the City Museum has its attractions. A spiral staircase is likely to wow younger and older visitors alike. A plain old stairwell is an exhibit in itself, with photographs and observations about New York on its walls. (The entryway reads: “This Is New York’s Most Exciting Stairwell.”) From Lewis Mumford (1979): “New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.”

Here’s a photograph that gives a good idea of the stairwell. And here’s an OCA post from 2014, also singing the Museum’s praises.

Overheard

[On the 6 train headed downtown. Three young men discuss boxing promotion as they share a package of Gummi Bears. ]

“I think about it synergistically.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Where’s my Profile?

If you notice something missing: the Profile that should appear in the sidebar has gone missing. And yet it still exists. The Blogger Help Forum has no answers, at least not yet. Here’s hoping that I can figure out the problem.

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8:04 p.m.: For now there’s a cheap fascimile in the sidebar.

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8:41 p.m.: Now the Profile is back, with my tweaks and improvements gone. Thanks, Google.

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8:58 p.m.: The problem seems to be deep in the heart of Blogger. Change the title from Profile and the whole thing disappears. Change “View my complete profile” to the more sensible “View profile” and the whole thing disappears.

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9:04 p.m.: How I got around the problem: I took a screenshot of the sidebar photograph, complete with border, from my saved version of Orange Crate Art. I uploaded the image to this post to get a URL. I then created a Text widget, put in the HTML for the photograph, and added the text underneath. Thus I now have a pseudo-Profile that satisfies my requirements, not Blogger’s.

Back in April, writing about Blogger’s blurry-Profile-picture problem, I described Google’s unannounced change in managing images as just one more eff yew from Google to its “users.” True then, true now.

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December 1: It appears that Profiles have vanished from and returned to many a sidebar. My final (I think) fix for the problem: I put the HTML for my old profile in a Text widget and added the blurry-Profile-picture fix to the Search widget. No more working against Blogger’s standards for the sidebar Profile.

Welcome to Illinois

“The rich families remaking Illinois are among a small group around the country who have channeled their extraordinary wealth into political power, taking advantage of regulatory, legal and cultural shifts that have carved new paths for infusing money into campaigns”: “A Wealthy Governor and His Friends Are Remaking Illinois” (The New York Times ).

Governor Bruce Rauner is Illinois’s version of Scott Walker. Woe is us.

[See Citizen Koch (dir. Carl Deal, Tia Lessin, 2013) for the playbook.]