Chris Sippel (1956–2017)

Chris and I were best friends in junior high. We’d meet and take the bus to Hackensack, New Jersey, and go to the Relic Rack and Hackensack Record King. Records, all the way. Chris was big on doo-wop. I was just discovering blues. We spent hours on the telephone at night, seeking out ridiculous clip art in the Yellow Pages: “Go to 318!” We found the Mothers of Invention LP Absolutely Free in a cut-out bin in the same drugstore where we discovered the National Lampoon. When Chris and his family went away for the summer, we exchanged letters, with many drawings — the Bowery Boys, three-toed sloths, all sorts of surreal comedy. Chris was a brilliant cartoonist and a big fan of Leo Gorcey, whom he drew in profile. (When Gorcey died, Chris sent a sympathy card to his widow.) We had a thing about three-toed sloths and imagined a world in which our algebra teacher kept a sloth named Lothar as a pet.

Chris and I drifted apart when he went off to attend a Catholic high school. I was happy to reconnect with him in 2008 after someone noticed his name in a blog post I wrote (about Hackensack's Main Street) and got in touch with me and then with him. We talked on the phone several times, and I was amazed that our interests in literature had developed in such similar ways — Chris was even, like me, a fan of the poet Gilbert Sorrentino, not exactly a household name. I was happy to learn that Chris still had Absolutely Free, which it turns out I’d given to him after tiring of it. We tried to figure out why we had drifted apart, something he said had happened with people at every time of transition in his life. And we agreed, yes, we should meet up. But it never happened. I remember leaving several messages — “We’re heading east this summer” — and never getting a return call.

I’m sorry to learn now that Chris’s life has ended. He was an incredibly creative, funny, smart guy, and that’s how I’ll remember him. I wish that I’d known him better, and for more than a handful of his sixty-one years.

*

June 10: I’ve posted two photographs from our eight-grade class trip to Washington, D.C.

Into the frying pan

[“Supercharged Sardines.” Field and Stream, October 2004.]

A little heat brings out and mellows the flavor. Lemon juice adds zing. A few red-pepper flakes wouldn’t hurt either.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

[After closing up a box of pasta with plastic wrap and a rubber band.]

“It keeps the weevils out.”

“We don’t have weevils.”

“And this is why.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Peanuts Donald

[Peanuts, June 6, 1970.]

His name is Thibault, but his hair and manner say “Donald.”

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

“Salacious material”

From James Comey’s prepared testimony:

During the dinner, the President returned to the salacious material I had briefed him about on January 6, and, as he had done previously, expressed his disgust for the allegations and strongly denied them. He said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn’t happen. [January 27 dinner.]

He described the Russia investigation as “a cloud” that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia. [March 30 telephone call.]

Strange: Trump circles back — twice — to the “salacious material” and denies wrongdoing. Was anyone besides Trump still thinking about that stuff in March? He doth protest too much, methinks. And I wonder: is “hookers” Comey’s word, or Trump’s?

*

April 19, 2018: With the release of James Comey’s memos, we now know that “hookers” is Trump’s word: “can you imagine me, hookers?” And we now know that on February 8, 2017, Trump circled back once more to “the hookers thing,” as he then called it.

“Sgt. Petsound’s”

Now, at WFMU (or, in the future, in the archives): “Sgt. Petsound’s.” Gary Sullivan is playing “tributes, covers, deconstructions, mashups, samples, nods, and more in response to two of the most influential albums of all time.”

Thanks to Music Clip of the Day for passing on the news of this show.

Too many ands?

The New Arthurian alerted me to a recent controversy involving the word and. When Paul Romer of the World Bank criticized the Bank staff’s writing and called for shorter, clearer documents, he pointed specifically to excessive use of and and insisted that the word account for not more than 2.6% of a Bank report. In a highly critical 2015 analysis of “Bankspeak,” Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre cite that percentage as the average frequency of and in academic writing.

One passage from a World Bank report that has come in for attention, by way of Moretti and Pestre’s analysis:

promote corporate governance and competition policies and reform and privatise state-owned enterprises and labour market/social protection reform

Is and really the problem? Moretti has said that “a few fewer ands” won’t fix the Bank’s writing problems. Romer has acknowledged that his emphasis on the conjunction is “a gimmick,” a way to call attention to matters of writing. Mark Liberman has listed literary works with more than 2.6% and. In first place: the King James Version of Genesis, with 9.55% and. As I began to think about and, Sammy Cahn’s lyrics for “Love and Marriage” popped into my head. Cahn beats Genesis: his 100-word lyric is 10% and. “Love and marriage, love and marriage, / Go together like a horse and carriage”: there’s a sentence that’s 23% and.

The real problem with the passage of Bank writing is not the ands but the words in between, piled up with an utter lack of clarity. Look again:

promote corporate governance and competition policies and reform and privatise state-owned enterprises and labour market/social protection reform

Does policies apply to both governance and competition, or to competition alone? Is the first reform a noun that pairs with policies, or a verb that pairs with privatise? And if reform is a verb, what sense is there in reforming enterprises that are to be privatized? And how might “labour market/social protection reform” be privatized? Wouldn’t privatizing reform amount to permitting private enterprise to do whatever it pleases?

And here I’m reminded of George Orwell’s observation in “Politics and the English Language” (1946) that one need not take on the responsibility of thinking when composing sentences:

You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

Or economic policy and the debasement of language.

Paul Romer fought a good fight, but the enemy is much bigger than and. Yes, fought. As Bloomberg reported in late May:

The World Bank’s chief economist has been stripped of his management duties after researchers rebelled against his efforts to make them communicate more clearly, including curbs on the written use of and.

Two Paul Romer websites
Notes for Bank insiders : Paul Romer

[“Love and Marriage,” music by Jimmy Van Heusen, lyrics by Sammy Cahn. I skipped the repeats when counting ands.]

Efficiency and effectiveness

“Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things”: Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Routledge, 1974).

Other Drucker-related posts
On figuring out where one belongs : On income disparity in higher ed : On integrity in leadership

“Fact from Fiction”

From the PBS NewsHour: “Fact from Fiction,” about teaching young people how to distinguish genuine news stories from falsehoods. Fred Croddon, a third-grader: “People, if they don’t know how to analyze it, will just say, ‘Oh, wow, that’s true!’” Smart kid.

Anil Dash on choices

“We don’t have a media and tech ecosystem that rewards long-term, thoughtful, contemplative, slow, meaningful choices”: Anil Dash, interviewed by Debbie Millman for the Design Matters podcast.