Good advice

Bernard Kleina, who as an untrained photographer documented Martin Luther King Jr.’s participation in the Chicago Freedom Movement: “I like to tell people that if you wait until you’re completely qualified for something, maybe it’s too late.”

The passing show

The Oxford English Dictionary ’s Word of the Day is passing show : “the spectacle of contemporary life; (also) an entertainment taking as its subject matter current events and interests.” I’m surprised to see that the first citation comes not (as I would have guessed) from the world of journalism but from Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad (1715). The lines are about Paris’s journey to Sparta:

When Greece beheld thy painted Canvas flow,
And Crowds stood wond’ring at the passing Show.

The phrase “the passing show” later became a title for several musical revues and for a newspaper column (1897–1900) by the young Willa Cather.

You can subscribe to the OED ’s Word of the Day here. And you should. As an OED representative reminds us, the Word of the Day is special.

A related post
SparkNotes and Homer

Swipe speed

A man asks a question in memory of his father: “What is the speed, in miles per hour, of a proper MetroCard swipe?” The answer: 10–40 inches per second, or 0.57–2.27 miles per hour.

I think my dad and this guy’s dad would have gotten along very well.

The Eisenhower S

Did The New York Times really create a special skinny S to squeeze the name Eisenhower into headlines? Sort of. The paper created, in fact, a special skinny everything. The Atlantic explains.

Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for passing this story along.

Related reading
All OCA typography posts (Pinboard)

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).]