James Cotton (1935–2017)

The harpist and singer James Cotton has died at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times has an obituary.

Here, courtesy of YouTube, is a 1996 outing with Cotton, Joe Louis Walker (guitar), Dave Maxwell (piano), and Charlie Haden (bass), Deep in the Blues. Really.

Scratchpad for macOS

Scratchpad, by Rinat Khanov.

Li’l Trumpy and Li’l Judge Judy

[Zippy, March 16, 2017.]

Today’s Zippy turns out to be exceedingly well-timed.

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[In the news: “Two Federal Judges Rule Against Trump’s Latest Travel Ban” (The New York Times).]

Cultural xenophobia

Jane Jacobs:

Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural vigor. Someone has aptly called self-imposed isolation a fortress mentality. [Karen] Armstrong describes it as a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit, ”always . . . seeking to know more and to extend . . . areas of competence and control of the environment,” to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backward to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.

Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (New York: Random House, 2004).

Also from this book
Credentialing v. educating

[The unidentified quotation is from Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (New York: Random House, 2000.]

An Oxford comma in the news

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma? The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, for one. Its decision in a Maine case concerning overtime pay hinges on the absence of an Oxford comma. Here’s the text of the decision.

Me, in a post about basic punctuation: “If you always put the [Oxford] comma in, you avoid problems with ambiguous or tricky sentences in which the comma’s absence might blur the meaning of your words.” Yep.

Thanks to the New Arthurian for passing on this news item.

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[The impertinent question that begins this post is the property of Vampire Weekend.]

“The beds would not get made”

Willa Cather, from a letter to her lifelong friend Irene Miner Weisz, October 22, 1945. Cather’s brother Roscoe had died the month before:

Now I don’t care about writing any more books. Now I know that nothing really matters to us but the people we love.

Of course, if we realized that when we are young, and just sat down and loved each other, the beds would not get made and very little of the world’s work would ever get done.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

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“As real as a cannon ball”

Joseph Joubert:

A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection  , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Being and nothingness : Brevity : Doing something well : “Everything is new” : Form and content : Irrelevancies and solid objects : Justified enthusiasm : Lives and writings : New books, old books : ’Nuff said (1) : ’Nuff said (2) : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Ruins v. reconstructions : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing : Wine

Billie Holiday, 1957

In The New York Times, photographs of Billie Holiday by Jerry Dantzic, taken during Holiday’s week-long engagement at the Sugar Hill nightclub in Newark, New Jersey, April 1957. From a forthcoming book of such photographs, Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill (W. W. Norton).

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Willa Cather, corrected again

In its initial magazine publication, Willa Cather’s story “Two Friends” made reference to a “transit of Venus.” William Lyon Phelps of Yale University wrote to tell Cather that she was in fact describing an occultation of Venus. On July 30, 1932, Cather sent a telegram to her publisher Alfred A. Knopf:

CHANGE TRANSIT TO OCCULTATION STOP I SAW IT WHATEVER IT WAS

WILLA CATHER

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

“Two Friends,” with the proper occultation, appears in Cather’s Obscure Destinies (1932).

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Willa Cather, corrected

After three readers wrote to say that they could not find My Ántonia for sale in Chicago, Willa Cather wrote to her publisher Houghton Mifflin. Production editor R. L. Scaife assured Cather that orders for the book were being filled. He suggested that store clerks were to blame. From Cather’s reply, February 21, 1920:

It must be, as you say, that they applied to a green salesman, or to several green salesmen. Could the fact that the buyers called my name rightly, and that clerks in bookstores usually call it “Kay-thur” have anything to do with it. It is all nonsense that an unusual name is an advantage in authorship. One had much better be named Jones. Salesmen in New York and Chicago always correct me when I pronounce my own name. Mr. Sell published a paragraph telling people that the name rhymed with ‘rather,’ but if it convinced others, it did not convince the bookstores.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

In the newspaper article “To Our Notion the Foremost American Woman Novelist,” Henry Blackman Sell noted that the name Cather is “pronounced to rhyme with rather, if you please” (Chicago Daily News, March 12, 1919).

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