Ida’s apostrophe

[As seen in Boston’s North End.]

Ida’s Italian Cuisine closed in 1913. But the sign still hangs. I like that apostrophe.

Also from the North End
Planter

[I wish the photograph were sharper. But what are you gonna do?]

MSNBC, sheesh

On MSNBC’s Hardball a few minutes ago, a talking head spoke of George W. Bush and “the /nuh-DEAR/ of his presidency.” Uh-uh. Merriam-Webster gives two pronunciations for nadir : /ˈnā-ˌdir/ and /ˈnā-dər/. Note to talking head: next time say “low point.”

[I can’t stand cable news.]

Hotshots, academically adrift

The Hoosier Hotshots: “That’s What I Learned in College” (1936). Was it ever thus? ’Twas.

Here is a website with everything one might want to learn about the Hoosier Hotshots. I first heard this song on Joe Bussard’s Country Classics, a radio show/podcast devoted to American music on 78s.

[The post title refers to Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses . Here is my review.]

Bloomsday 2016

It is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) begins on June 16, 1904, and ends in the early hours of the following day. Here is a passage from “Penelope,” the novel’s final episode. (Episodes, not chapters: like the Odyssey .) Molly Bloom, Mrs. Leopold Bloom, is lying in bed awake and thinking.



So we know what Mrs. Bloom would think of Ulysses .

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)
2015 (Stephen and company, very drunk)

VDP talks about Randy Newman

For the podcast My Favorite Album , Van Dyke Parks talks to Jeremy Dylan about Randy Newman’s Randy Newman : “There are a lot of insults on the way to a record album. I mean, there’s blood on the tracks.”

Related reading
All OCA Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)
A new song from Randy Newman

RZ, i.m.

My friend Rob Zseleczky died at this time three years ago. He was a poet and musician. These lines are from the poem “To —” (1821), by his favorite poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The period and dash (Shelley’s punctuation, not an editor’s) make me think of a string plucked and still sounding. We will toast to Rob’s memory tonight. Still sounding.

[Text from The Poems of Shelley, Volume Four: 1820–1821 , ed. Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan, and Kelvin Everest (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).]

Who Is My Voice?

Who Is My Voice? provides the answers to important questions: Have your representatives in Congress accepted contributions from the NRA? Have they voted to defund Planned Parenthood? The website also offers the means to call, e-mail, or send a tweet to your representatives.

The oldest Ellingtonian?

Eve Duke, aka Eve Smith, aka Yvonne Lanauze, is still making music at the age of ninety-one, in a residential care facility in Vancouver. As Yvonne — just Yvonne — she sang on three 1950 Duke Ellington recordings, “Love You Madly,” “Mood Indigo,” and “Sophisticated Lady.” Here’s a 1945 photograph of Lanauze and Ellington. And some later photographs from Lanauze’s career with Three B’s and a Honey.

Yvonne is not the only mononymous singer to perform with the Ellington band. In the early 1970s, Ellington presented the singer Aura Rully, known as Aura:

Ellington closed the afternoon by bringing out a remarkable and beautiful Rumanian soprano named Aura, who hummed and scatted “Mood Indigo,” pushing her voice up almost beyond hearing and never missing a note or losing pitch.

Whitney Balliett, New York Notes: A Journal of Jazz in the Seventies (1977), from an entry for July 8, 1972.

*

November 6, 2021: Here’s Eve Duke, earlier this year, talking, singing, and playing.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

Planter

[As seen in Boston’s North End.]

I took a quick picture of this planter, which hangs outside a restaurant. We thought that everything here is likely edible. Can anyone identify all the plants? Click for a much larger, much tastier view.

HGSE Dean’s speech at Open Culture

James E. Ryan, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, gave a terrific speech at the HGSE diploma ceremony in May. (I linked to the video in this post.) The speech focuses on five questions:

Wait, what?
I wonder why, or if?
Couldn’t we at least?
How can I help?
What really matters?

And a “bonus” question, from Raymond Carver’s poem “Late Fragment”: “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so?” (Misquoted as “And did you get what you wanted out of life, even so?”)

An excerpt from the speech is now the stuff of a post at Open Culture, which asserts that the questions will bring “happiness & success.” Well, no. The most the dean claims is that asking these questions will give a person “a very good chance of being both successful and happy,” and it’s a tongue-in-cheek claim, “slightly outlandish, but this is a graduation speech.” Carver’s answer to the question “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so?” is “I did”:

And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

And Dean Ryan:

if you never stop asking and listening for good questions, you will feel beloved on this earth, and just as importantly, you will help others, especially students, feel the same.

Now that’s a good definition of happiness and success.

A related post
Commencement addresses (With a single question from my undergrad commencement)