Here’s a good way to reduce a college classroom to rapt silence

Post title from experience — and it was a classroom in which no student had ever heard the song, by anyone. The guitarist is Tony Mottola.

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Mark Trail revised

[Mark Trail , December 12, 2015.]


[Mark Trail revised, December 12, 2015.]

At least Frank would be home more often.

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[Now playing: “I Won’t Dance.”]

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.

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[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).

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[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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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.)

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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.