From The Day of the Owl

Captain Bellodi is telling the story of a doctor in a Sicilian prison who decides to remove Mafia members from permanent residence in the prison hospital, where they enjoy preferential treatment. When the prison administrators ignore his directive, the doctor appeals to higher authorities:


Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl. 1961. Trans. Arcibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver (New York: New York Review Books, 2003).

The Day of the Owl an excellent novella (in an occasionally awkward translation): a chain of murders, an enigmatic investigator (no first name), and what the narrator calls “the problem of the South,” a criminal enterprise whose existence cannot be officially acknowledged.

I picked up this book in June at I AM Books, an Italian-American bookstore in Boston’s North End. The New York Review Books spine caught my eye. And now I want to read more of Leonardo Sciascia. And NYRB has four more Sciascia titles in print.

Truman Capote meets Willa Cather

“‘I ought to tell you —’ She paused; then, in a rushing voice, more or less whispered: ‘I wrote those books.’”

From an unfinished account that Truman Capote began writing the day before his death. It was published in Vanity Fair in 2006, but I discovered it just days ago.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Griffith and Keane

[Zippy, December 14, 2016.]

Bil Griffith’s affection for The Family Circus is well known. But Did You Know that Bil Keane once collaborated with Griffith on a series of Zippy strips in which Zippy entered the world of Family Circus? And that Griffith on one occasion drew Zippy into a Family Circus panel? The collaborations appear in Griffith’s “Bil Keane: An Appreciation” (The Comics Journal).

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Notice the text on the left border.]

No TV news

Daughter Number Three wrote a post about the idea of giving up television news and linked to a brief account from someone who’s done just that.

Elaine and I haven’t watched a minute of cable news since November 8. The only television news we have watched: the PBS NewsHour episode that paid tribute to Gwen Ifill. Our not watching benefits our mental health and serves as a private (and inefficacious) act of protest. CNN and company gave one presidential candidate scads of free airtime, treated another as an inevitable nominee, and utterly marginalized the campaign of a third. (I bet you can guess who’s who.) So include us out. There is plenty of news to be had from The New York Times and NPR and other sources in print and (motionless) pixels, minus hack pundits and false drama. I have in mind CNN’s disconcerting “Breaking news!” announcement, followed, almost always, by yet another rehash of an already reported story.

I realize only now how my weekdays had fallen into a pattern before the election: do things, various things, all day, and then put the news on in the late afternoon and feel besieged. I dread what the next four years might mean for my country, but I don’t need a television to know about it.

Reader, have your news habits changed since the election?

[Full disclosure: I will most likely go back to the PBS NewsHour, but not anytime soon.]

“This Week in Hate”

The third installment of a new New York Times feature: “This Week in Hate.” You can find all installments here.

BIZZ

[Henry, December 13, 2016.]

Trailing clouds of glory, Henry approaches a two-dimensional variety store. Today, “variety store” has become another name for a dollar store, but in earlier times, the variety store sold a great range of brand-name goods. In kidhood I bought Aurora and Revell model kits (cars, monsters, planes) at a variety store — Cheap Charlie’s, on Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn. A vivid memory: the shelves in the front-right corner of the store, dark wood, built into the wall, with Elmer’s Glue-All, LePage Mucilage, and unlined notepads. I always found mucilage a little horrifying — partly because of the nipple-like applicator cap, but mostly because of the word mucilage itself. I was eight or nine or ten, and we were an Elmer’s family.

There’s still a Cheap Charlie’s elsewhere in Brooklyn, perhaps a descendant, perhaps an unrelated Charlie. If the epithet fits. . . .

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

Klinkenborg’s snow

Verlyn Klinkenborg:


“December,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

The sane part of me thinks that snow is best appreciated not from the interior of a moving car but from an unmoving sofa or chair, with a thick layer of insulation — in other words, a house — between me and the weather. But another part of me sides with Klinkenborg. I know that feeling of driving into a vacuum, and I know that I like it, at least in retrospect. See also Robert Bly’s poem “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter.”

I’ve been waiting for snow to post this passage. It is snowing.

Related reading
All OCA Verlyn Klinkenborg posts (Pinboard)

[“Abyssal vacuum”: a pun on “a Bissell vacuum”? I hope not. But that’s what Mac Dictation thought I was saying.]

Deresiewicz v. D’Agata

“It kills me to think that there are going to be people walking around who believe that Socrates was an essayist because a self-important ignoramus named D’Agata told them so”: William Deresiewicz writes in the Atlantic about John D’Agata’s conception of the essay and his blithe disregard for fact.

I gave up on D’Agata on the second page of The Lifespan of a Fact (2012, co-authored with Jim Fingal). Curious about the anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009), I just looked at Amazon to see what D’Agata says about Thomas Browne. A sourceless sentence that D’Agata presents as George Orwell’s made me curious:

It is Browne’s introspection which shifted us from the outside world of rhetoric, to the inner and private world of mystery and wonder.

It turns out that the sentence is impossible to find online. As far as I can tell, it cannot be found in Orwell’s work. And it turns out that a reviewer wondered about this very sentence in 2010. I did find a version of the sentence in David Shields‘s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010):

It is Sir Thomas Browne’s introspection that shifted us from the outside world of rhetoric to the inner and private world of mystery and wonder.

In Shields’s book the sentence is attributed only to “Orwell,” without further detail. Shields quotes from or cites D’Agata frequently. I think it’s reasonable to wonder whether the sentence about Browne is really from Orwell. Surely D’Agata must know.

But that’s the end of my look at John D’Agata’s work. Arthur Schopenhauer: “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”

[Does the sentence even sound like Orwell?]

*

December 15: I e-mailed D’Agata asking about a source for the sentence and received an automated “away” message making it clear that he will not be replying.

A related post
Make it known (Four sources for three D’Agata epigraphs: Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, and the poet who first put those three together, Douglas Crase)

Quadrille revival

From Honoré de Balzac’s novella The Duchesse de Langeais:

“What is the matter, my dear Antoinette? You look frightful.”

“I will revive after a quadrille,” she answered, giving her hand to a young man who had just appeared.

The Human Comedy: Selected Stories , trans. from the French by Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump (New York: New York Review Books, 2014). This story translated by Cosman.

Also from Balzac
“Easily five foot eight or nine”
Orgy-related

Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams

Washington Phillips. Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. Dust-to-Digital. 2016.

Mother’s Last Word to Her Son : Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There : Paul and Silas in Jail : Lift Him Up That’s All : Denomination Blues — Part 1 : Denomination Blues — Part 2 : I Am Born to Preach the Gospel : Train Your Child : Jesus Is My Friend : What Are They Doing in Heaven Today : A Mother’s Last Word to Her Daughter : I’ve Got the Keys to the Kingdom : You Can’t Stop a Tattler — Part 1 : You Can’t Stop a Tattler — Part 2 : I Had a Good Father and Mother : The Church Needs Good Deacons

Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways, 1952) was first issued with extraordinary cover art: a Theodor de Bry drawing of a celestial monochord, a one-stringed instrument, tuned by a hand emerging from a cloud. The instrument is a representation of musica universalis, the music of the spheres, the harmonies of heavenly bodies in motion. In the 1960s the mystical gave way to social realism: Folkways replaced the de Bry drawing with a photograph of a Depression farmer. But the monochord returned for the anthology’s 1997 CD reissue. There is no getting away from the music of the spheres.

It’s unfortunate that Washington Phillips did not find a place in the Smith anthology. A monochord is, in essence, a zither, and Phillips (1880–1954) was a zitherist of extraordinary ability, playing, it seems, two zithers, joined (again, it seems) to make a single instrument played with two hands. Phillips called his instrument the manzarene (a play perhaps on “Nazarene”). Its sound is unique in American music. It suggests to my ears a celeste, a harp, a kora. Between 1927 and 1929 Phillips’s manzarene and voice were preserved on eight 78s, not by a folklorist or musicologist but by Frank Walker, a producer and talent scout for Columbia Records, who discovered Bessie Smith and later signed Hank Williams.

Phillips’s music is blissful stuff, a plaintive tenor voice with celestial-sounding accompaniment. Where Blind Willie Johnson knocks you down with his power, Phillips invites you to sit and visit a while. He sings of Jesus as a friend and easer of burdens, and as the one truth that makes all theological disputes irrelevant: “But you better have Jesus, I tell you that’s all” (“Denomination Blues”). Several songs concern relations between parents and children, and the necessity of having children “under good control” (“The Church Needs Good Deacons”). Phillips is skeptical of book learning, twice rhyming school and fool. Consider this maxim:

Education is all right
I will tell you before you start,
Before you educate the head,
Try to educate the heart (“Train Your Child”)

And though Phillips sings of hell, his depiction of the world’s badness is fairly mild, centering on everyday pleasures and domestic treachery: card playing, dancing, making dates with married men, buying dresses for women other than one’s wife. A lost two-part recording, “The World Is in a Bad Fix Everywhere,” may present a more dire picture.

The most affecting performance here is from Phillips’s final recording session, “I Had a Good Father and Mother.” Its story is poignant but without self-pity, with Phillips alternating between his tenor voice and an ethereal, wordless falsetto. This song might be the music of the spheres.

Dust-to-Digital has produced the definitive edition of Washington Phillips’s recordings, with excellent remastering. For the listener who (like me) knows the music from previous reissues, Michael Corcoran’s liner notes make this release a must, with photographs, extensive documentation of Phillips’s life, recollections from neighbors and relatives, and the clearest account we are likely to have of Phillips’s instrument. Misconceptions corrected, one after another.

Here’s a page about this release: Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. Thanks to Dust-to-Digital for a review copy of this recording.

*

11:28 a.m.: The link to the image of the celestial monochord is fixed. It was a Blogger problem.

[An aside: I first saw de Bry’s drawing of the celestial monochord in the April/May 1969 issue of Sing Out! magazine, still on my bookshelves. That issue had the first installment of a John Cohen interview with Harry Smith.]