Caroline, no!

Billboard reports that the Beach Boys are considering an invitation to perform at an upcoming presidential inauguration. This photograph and some recent history make me think that the response to this invitation will be yes we will Yes. And I suspect that members of Mike Love and Bruce Johnston’s supporting cast will not be allowed to opt out. They are not Rockettes.

I long ago learned, with some exceptions, to separate the art from the artist. So I won’t be burning my LPs and CDs. But this news is just one more dab of awful in awful times.

I’m dreaming of a liverwurst sandwich

Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby) explains his theory of dreams to Betty Haynes (Rosemary Clooney). From White Christmas (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1954):

“I got a whole big theory about it, you know — different kinds of food make for different kinds of dreams. Now if I have a ham and cheese on rye like that, I dream about a tall cool blonde, sort of a first-sack attack, you know. Turkey, I dream about a brunette, a little on the scatback side, but oh, sexy, sexy.”

“What about liverwurst?”

“I dream about liverwurst.”

A truly weird moment, whose weirdness is compounded by the Crosby affect, a fleeting German accent, and a pitcher of buttermilk, which Crosby calls “the cow.” (And why buttermilk and not just milk?) That Vera-Ellen and Danny Kaye are in the film doesn’t help. I don’t get Bing Crosby. I don’t get Vera-Ellen. And I don’t get Danny Kaye. But Rosemary Clooney, boy, could she sing.

You can relive this strange scene, as often as you like, at YouTube.

[Scatback: “an offensive back in football who is an especially fast and elusive ballcarrier.” So the brunette is hard to get? And the blonde is easily tackled? Bob, why are you talking so rudely to Betty?]

“Hypothesis Song”

Ben Leddy is at it again. With illustrations and hands-on experiments by Ben and Alison Slate.

More songs at Ben’s YouTube channel.

Relativity: LPs

Walking past a stand of vinyl in Barnes and Noble, I realized how large LPs now look: they’re easily mistaken for wall calendars. CDs have changed my sense of scale. And it doesn’t help that the LPs I most often see are the ones on my shelves, just spines, 1/8″ or 3/16″ or so wide.

The LP’s size has always been to its advantage: front and back covers and the occasional gatefold invite and reward attention, before, during, and after listening. No background music: only background looking and reading.

Related reading
All OCA relativity posts

John Ashbery, New Collages

At the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan, an exhibit of art by John Ashbery, New Collages. Sixteen collages are on view via the link. Here is a work in which old masters meet:


John Ashbery, Storm at Castelfranco. Collage on paper. 2016. 12 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches.

Previous exhibits of Ashbery’s collages at Tibor de Nagy: 2011 and 2008. Thanks to the gallery for permission to reproduce this collage.

Bob Dylan, and not John Ashbery? Krazy.

Related reading
All OCA Ashbery posts (Pinboard)

[The collage places George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Offissa Bull Pupp in a detail of the Giorgione (Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco) painting The Tempest. “Storm at Castelfranco” is the title of a poem by Chester Kallman (and, later, the title of a book of poems). Some Ashbery and Kallman history here.]

From an old notebook

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Click for a larger view. Nabokov wrote out his lectures: “meticulously chosen words” indeed.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Other bits from an old notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors : Alfred Appel Jr. on twentieth-century art and literature : Barney : Beauty and the Beast and kid talk : Eleanor Roosevelt : Halloween observations : John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch : Plato, Shirley Temple, vulgarity, wisdom, Stan Laurel : Square dancing, poetry, criticism, slang

“Missile Mail”

“Missile Mail: Regulus Scores Historic First” (1959). From British Pathé. Found via Sidedoor.

[YouTube’s embedded ads, impossible to remove, are the only ads that will ever appear in these pages. You can skip the ad after five seconds.]

Sidedoor, a podcast

Sidedoor is a new podcast from the Smithsonian: “stories about science, art, history, humanity and where they unexpectedly overlap.” My favorite episode: mail by missile, an orangutan being prepared for motherhood, and Phyllis Diller’s joke files. What brings those three stories together? Delivery!

The podcast’s delivery itself is sometimes a little hard to take: I cringe when I hear a phrase like “straight-up hubris.” But Sidedoor is a show to keep an eye on — that is, to listen to.

Words as money

“Money,” Wallace Stevens says, “is a kind of poetry.” Words and sentences, Harry R. Warfel says, are a kind of money. A surprising passage in a book about the place of grammar in education:

Language is the coin of the realm of thought. Like money, words and sentences interchange among people in the life processes of society. Just as the fiscal operations of a nation are intricate and infinitely complicated and yet seemingly simple to the child that exchanges a nickel for a candy bar, so the transfer of a few words — like “I love you” — produces a simple yet immense effect. That effect arises not merely from a momentary vocal noise or written scrawl but from a complexity of present and past experiences. Its very utterance portends a future of untold consequences of shared joys, pains, sorrows, griefs, and hopes.

Who Killed Grammar? (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1952).

Related posts
Money as poetry : The Warfel Law of Divided Usage

The Warfel Law of Divided Usage

Harry R. Warfel:

Several years ago I announced the Warfel Law of Divided Usage: “Whenever a variant is denounced as wrong by books or teachers, that ‘wrong’ usage will gain currency and will occur frequently in speech and writing.” The harping upon due to, different than, ain’t, and try and do has merely accelerated the adoption of these so-called errors by speakers and writers. . . . Emphasis creates a pattern that flashes automatically into the mind. For this reason wise teachers stress normative usages rather than “errors.”

Who Killed Grammar? (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1952).

See also David Lambuth’s Golden Book on Writing: “what the ’prentice writer needs to be told is what to do and not what not to do.”

But as one of Warfel’s examples suggests, emphasizing “normative usages” can itself lead to problems: She, he, and I (with I placed last), Warfel says, leads to Give some candy to he, she, and I. (And, I would add, to between he and I.) Misguided corrections also lead to problems: over many years of teaching, I often noticed students using in which where which alone was needed. (For instance: Hamlet’s soliloquy, in which shows us his difficulty in taking action.) I have long suspected that in which results from misguided teachers changing, say, the house I live in to the house in which I live. At some point, an in before which may become unfortunately automatic.

I hope some teacher somewhere finds the Warfel Law of Divided Usage useful in helping students to understand the sources of some of their writing problems.

A related post
Ending a sentence with it

[I noticed Why Grammar? mentioned in the first pages of Bryan Garner’s Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation (2016). Among Warfel’s books: Noah Webster: Schoolmaster to America (1936) and, as co-author, American College English: A Handbook of Usage and Composition (1949).]