Frank Sinatra centenary

[Photograph by John Dominis. 1965. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Frank Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915.

This photograph appears to come from the work John Dominis did for the Life feature “The Private World and Thoughts of Frank Sinatra” (April 23, 1965). This photograph did not make the magazine. It’s a curious image: Sinatra looks both young and scrawny (front) and old and pudgy (back). You can see the bald despite the towel around his head. Such a photograph might seem to suggest that Sinatra was just an ordinary guy: he shaved himself one cheek at a time, just like the rest of us. But I say no: because when Sinatra looked into the mirror when shaving, he saw Frank Sinatra looking back.

Sinatra’s voice is among my earliest musical memories. (Thanks, Dad.) I listen often and will be listening today.

Related reading
All OCA Frank Sinatra posts (Pinboard)

[The plastic container on the left? “W. H.”: witch hazel.]

Recently updated

A small press v. the Salinger estate Devault-Graves ends its lawsuit.

Age and happiness

From an interview with Dilip V. Jeste, M.D., a geriatric neuropsychiatrist. He is talking about age and happiness and wisdom. He recently turned seventy:

Q: Are you happier now than you were, say, ten or twenty years ago?

A: Absolutely. I feel that I know myself better, both my limitations and strengths, and I don’t pay as much attention to what others might think of me. So there’s less peer pressure.

For example, the research I am doing right now on successful aging and wisdom, I’ve been doing that now for the last ten years or so — I don’t think I would have done that when I was younger, because it is risky to do research in these areas. . . . Thirty-five years ago, I would have worried about my reputation and so on. Now I feel that I am well-established, and if somebody doesn’t like that, so be it. And now I feel confident enough to continue working on them.

From “Late Bloomers,” a episode of the radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge . I’m happy that I’m giving the show a chance again.

[Transcription mine.]

Robert Walser: “Ah, how lovely”

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

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

[Shades of Frank O’Hara.]

New directions in housing

An NPR commentator: “We lived in a two-story house in the basement.”

That must have been some basement.

A possible revision: “We lived in the basement of a two-story house.”

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All OCA NPR posts (Pinboard)

Hallmark ex machina

“Guys, guys, guys, okay, listen to this. My trusted producer Monica just gave me the most amazing news in the world. Apparently, while we were broadcasting, affiliates across the country were inundated with phone calls from people who want to donate to the Arts Center. Monica set up a Kickstarter fund, and we have raised $264,000 and counting. And they want to know where they can buy your paintings. It’s unbelievable. Apex has met its match. We're going to keep the Arts Center!”

“That’s awesome!”

Awesome and unbelievable, which might be the same thing. Dialogue from The Christmas Parade (dir. Jonathan Wright, 2014). It’s at YouTube, at least for a little while, which saved me from having to wait until tomorrow to watch again and record this bit of dialogue. Yes, I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries. Seek help I shall — but not before Christmas.

[“And they want to know where they can buy your paintings”: that is, the hunky guy’s paintings.]

Robert Walser: “nothing less than ghastly”

Robert Walser’s first novel The Tanners (1907) begins with Simon Tanner entering a bookstore and pleading for the chance to work there. The bookseller gives him a one-week trial. That’s long enough for Simon to make up his mind:


Robert Walser, The Tanners , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2009).

The Tanners is a deliriously funny and odd novel. Walser’s prose takes on a special strangeness in an extended narrative: characters speechify for pages on end; they undertake difficult, interminable walks; crucial events come out of nowhere and pass with no further mention. It’s something like reading a novel that has lost the ability to remember its narrative line from chapter to chapter. I love it.

I count Robert Walser and David Schubert as two great lucky finds in my life of reading. In other words, writers whose names might prompt a “Who?” (Though Walser was and is now far better known than Schubert.)

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Phrases to confuse

From Oxford Dictionaries, a quiz: American phrases to confuse Brits. For example (and note the single quotation marks):

If something ‘jumped the shark’, then it:
○ Escaped from a dangerous situation
○ Began a period of inexorable decline in
    quality or popularity
○ Avoided payment of overdue loans
○ Went down to Florida for the winter

There’s also an Oxford quiz with British phrases to confuse Americans. That quiz is more difficult, objectively speaking.

Willa Cather on light and shade

The sky for the past few days has been grey or white. This morning it’s blue, with sharp low sun, as if a desk lamp were shining on the streets. The only grey and white today are faint clouds on the horizon, the prairie version of mountains. Out on a walk, I thought of Willa Cather:

Nobody can paint the sun, or sunlight. He can only paint the tricks that shadows play with it, or what it does to forms. He cannot even paint those relations of light and shade — he can only paint some emotion they give him, some man-made arrangement of them that happens to give him personal delight — a conception of clouds over distant mesas (or over the towers of St. Sulpice) that makes one nerve in him thrill and tremble. At bottom all he can give you is the thrill of his own poor little nerve — the projection in paint of a fleeting pleasure in a certain combination of form and colour, as temporary and almost as physical as a taste on the tongue.

“Light on Adobe Walls,” in Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies of Writing as an Art . 1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. First published 1920.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

William Maxwell on his habit of work

From his 1982 Paris Review interview:

I like to work in my bathrobe and pajamas, after breakfast, until I suddenly perceive, from what’s on the page in the typewriter, that I’ve lost my judgment. And then I stop. It’s usually about twelve thirty. But I hate getting dressed. The cleaning woman (who may not approve of it, though she’s never said), my family, the elevator men, the delivery boy from Gristedes — all of them are used to seeing me in this unkempt condition. What it means to me is probably symbolic — you can have me after I’ve got my trousers on, but not before. When I retired from The New Yorker they offered me an office, which was very generous of them because they’re shy on space, but I thought, “What would I do with an office at The New Yorker ? I would have to put my trousers on and ride the subway downtown to my typewriter. No good.”

Other William Maxwell posts
On childhood and familiar objects : On “the greatest pleasure there is” : On Melville and Cather : On sentences

[Gristedes: a New York supermarket chain.]