Labor Day

[“Loading oranges into refrigerator car at a co-op orange packing plant.” Photograph by Jack Delano. Redlands, California, March 1943. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Click for a larger view.]

Orange crate work.

The Library of Congress had made this photograph available via Flickr.

Related reading
All OCA Jack Delano posts

John Ashbery (1927–2017)

John Ashbery, from “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” in Houseboat Days (New York: Viking, 1977).

The poet John Ashbery has died at the age of ninety. The New York Times has an obituary. I chose the lines above for several reasons: the Wallace Stevens-like meditative voice, the intimations of mortality, the genial resolve to move along, like, say, Adam and Eve or Lycidas (“to be ambling on’s / The tradition”), the comic diction (“Therefore bivouac we,” “the big, / Vaguer stuff”). All in a poem that’s inspired by one Merrie Melodies cartoon (Duck Amuck) and shares a title with another.

And I chose these lines because “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” has special importance for me. The poem (available here) begins with a catalogue of items from the dowdy world that includes “the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile / Escritoire.” Who? A once-popular writer whose name I know only because of this poem. Years ago, I noticed one of Miller’s books at a library book-sale and sent it to John Ashbery in care of his agent. (Why not?) A year later, I received a letter of thanks, which I found in my mailbox right before walking into the poetry class in which I’d just taught an Ashbery poem.

In 2002, I visited New York City’s Museum of American Folk Art to see a Henry Darger exhibit and attend a reading by Ashbery, whose Girls on the Run (1999) was inspired by Darger’s work. (I was writing something about Ashbery and Darger.) I was second in line for the reading and sat in the front row (after vacillating). And who came in and sat down next to me? Yes, John Ashbery. I said hello (why not?) and he nodded back. “John,” I said, “you don’t know me, but I sent you a book several years ago by Helen Topping Miller.” “I still have that book,” he said. I said that I was glad. A little more conversation followed, before and after the reading. John Ashbery was not only one of the great poets of our time: he was a sweet, kind, generous man.

Related reading
All OCA John Ashbery posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“American cheese?”

“No, cheese cheese.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

“Popular with” athletes

One more comment on the New York Times article about academics and athletics at Florida State: to describe certain courses as “popular with” athletes is to be exceedingly decorous. The truth is that athletes who lack the ability to do genuine college work are steered, routinely, toward Mickey Mouse coursework that will pose no danger to their academic eligibility.

I recall, many years ago, meeting up with a student-athlete I had taught in a summer program for incoming freshmen. He was now a junior, with more than two years of junk coursework and without the prerequisites to begin work on a major — any major. How do you think that happened?

Football and grades at FSU

“Brazilian coffee is one of few places that has a carnival and the coffee place a major role just as much as the dancing and the food”: a college student’s writing, quoted in a New York Times article about football, grades, and a brave, ethical teaching assistant at Florida State University.

A related post
Modest proposals (Goodbye to Big Sports)
“Think middle school report” (A scandal at UNC)

A criminal exposed

Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot, trans. E.K. Brown, Dorothea Walter, and John Watkins (New York: The Modern Library, 1950).

EXchange names on screen

[Down Three Dark Streets (dir. Arnold Laven, 1954). Click either image for a larger view.]

An extortionist just called that DUnkirk number. Better get the police. No, better: the FBI. They’re in the telephone book too. DUnkirk and MAdison were both, at some point, authentic Los Angeles exchanges.

Watching this film, a documentary-style FBI procedural, I couldn’t help thinking of a former FBI director now in the news. From the narrator’s voiceover:

Often more important than science is the intelligence, the imagination, of the individual agent, the FBI man. The FBI man, with his special knowledge of human weakness and his ability to probe that weakness and thus trap the criminal into his own betrayal.

It’s still Mueller Time.

You can learn more about EXchange names (and pick one to go with your number) at The Telephone EXchange Name Project. Down Three Dark Streets is at YouTube, and is well worth watching.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : Chinatown : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Dream House : East Side, West Side : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire

Lash tab

Elaine and I were getting coffee in the library when I wondered about the patch on her backpack. We thought that a much younger person, say, one of the baristas, might know. No idea. So I looked it up.

That patch is called a lash tab or pig snout. The first name suggests one of the patch’s primary purposes. The other primary purposes: to look cool and to provoke questions.

See also the mysterious extra eyelets on sneakers.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, September 1, 2017.]

In the comics, school still begins after Labor Day. Which doesn’t explain that small two-or-three-dimensional thing next to the young woman’s arm. Motion lines? Street sculpture? A piece of paper, which would mean that the young woman levitates objects or litters? A piece of paper without a complete outline, which would defy the laws of comics? It’s not difficult to eliminate the problem:


[Hi and Lois, my revision, September 1, 2017.]

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Blade tumbler

I asked my mom about the 1950 scare-buying frenzy, which rang no bell for her. But when I mentioned that people were stocking up on razors and razor blades, she remembered that in the WWII years, her father lengthened the life of his razor blades by sharpening them on the inside of a drinking glass.

That practice must have been common: it’s mentioned in a 1933 Everyday Science and Mechanics article by J.G. Pratt, “Delusions About Shaving.” Think of this article as an exercise in Depression-era mythbusting: “Many men,“ Pratt writes, ”fool themselves into believing that a razor blade can be sharpened on the inside of a tumbler, either with or without water.” Pratt acknowledges that a tumbler can sometimes sharpen a blade “to a very mild degree.” But he suspects that “the vast majority who are resorting to this practice are receiving no benefit from it at all.” Humph.

Pratt was Scientific Photographer for Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Entomology. Accompanying his article: a photograph of a blade held in a tumbler of water and photographs of blade edges under magnification. Because science.

[One hundred posts this month. That’s all until September.]