NPR, sheesh

Heard yesterday on All Things Considered: “You crafted this movie from scratch.”

As I wrote in a 2015 post, “When everything from poems to pot to munchies is crafted, it’s time to say vogue word and move on.”

Better: “You wrote and directed this movie.”

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Winter afternoons

Emily Dickinson, the first stanza of 320:



We’ve had only two winter afternoons thus far, but I’ve been thinking about this poem and noticing the light over the past few days. Together the poem and the light have made me think of my undergraduate self, walking in the late afternoon on a nearly empty campus in late December, the dead zone between the end of classes and the start of final examinations. I wouldn’t call the slant of light on such an afternoon oppressive. I’d call it melancholy and assertive: pay attention as I, the only sun in the sky, sink. This afternoon there’s no sun, no slant: the sky is merely white, and now turning grey.

Dickinson’s poem sits in a folder in my head with Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” and “Neutral Tones” and Ted Berrigan’s “A Certain Slant of Sunlight.” But I didn’t have that folder as an undergraduate.

Related reading
All OCA Dickinson posts (Pinboard)

Roswell Rudd (1935-2017)

The trombonist Roswell Rudd has died at the age of eighty-two. The Ottawa Citizen has an obituary. Like Jaki Byard or Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Rudd played the whole history of jazz on his instrument. A YouTube sampler, with music by Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, Rudd, and Traditional:

“Blue Turning Grey Over You” (with Lafayette Harris) : “Ko-Ko” (with Steve Lacy) : “Brilliant Corners” (with Steve Lacy) : “Twelve Bars” (with Lafayette Harris) : “Bamako” (with Toumani Diabaté) : “Dry Bones” (with Sonic Youth)

Bonus: Rudd appears in Jazz on a Summer’s Day (dir. Bert Stern and Aram Avakian, 1960) as a member of Eli’s Chosen Six, the Yale Dixielanders who motor their way through the film.

*

December 23: Francis Davis’s 1993 profile of Roswell Rudd, “White Anglo-Saxon Pythagorean,” is online.

*

December 26: The New York Times has an obituary.

Zippy and Proust

[Zippy, December 22, 2017.]

The title of today’s strip: “Remembrance of Flings Past.”

Related OCA posts, Venn-style
Proust : Proust and Zippy : Zippy (Pinboard)

What’s for dinner

Holly Golightly’s cooking:


Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958).

A related post
Truman Capote meets Willa Cather

HI-

[Henry, December 21, 2017.]

No WI-, not in the Henry world.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)
Maslow, revised

Lyrebird

Found via an episode of The World in Words about speech synthesis: Lyrebird. Read a minimum of thirty sentences into your computer’s microphone (example: “I usually like to eat flying tomato salad”), and Lyrebird creates a digital version of your voice.

I tried Lyrebird this afternoon, with just thirty sentences, and the voice that resulted is pretty plausible. (A demonstration.) I could never mistake this voice for my own, but it does sound something like me, a sleepy me, a world-weary me, a me beset by ennui. But Lyrebird doesn’t know how to pronounce ennui, not yet anyway.

I don’t want to begin to imagine the uses that such technology might serve. (That’s me talking.)

Imaginary movie

The Hallmark Zone. Troubled by the state of the world, a gentle scholar travels to a quaint town to watch the making of a holiday movie. Pressed into service for a cocoa-shop crowd scene, the scholar learns the true meaning of figurant, and discovers that his new reality is one that he cannot — and does not want to — escape.

Related reading
All OCA Hallmark Movies posts
Merriam-Webster on figurant

Recently updated

Pronouns and institutions There’s now a fact-finding report and a university president’s statement.

Hallmark hypercorrection

I don’t know where my cable company gets descriptions for its programming. But I know that its description of the Hallmark movie My Christmas Love can be found here and there online:

A woman receives presents from an anonymous suitor who’s inspired by the “12 Days of Christmas,” and she tries to uncover whom the mysterious gift-giver is.

Who, not whom.

Just as whom is not to be confused with who, My Christmas Love is not to be confused with 12 Gifts of Christmas, a Hallmark movie in which an unemployed artist gets hired as personal shopper for an executive type. I know, twelve, right. But they are two entirely different movies.

[From the Garner’s Modern English Usage entry for hypercorrection: “Sometimes people strive to abide by the strictest etiquette, but in the process behave inappropriately. The very motivations that result in this irony can play havoc with the language: a person will strive for a correct linguistic form but instead fall into error. Linguists call this phenomenon ‘hypercorrection’ — a common shortcoming.” And from the same entry, on using whom for who: “Perhaps writers should get points for trying, but those who don’t know how to use whom should abstain in questionable contexts.”]