“What you write down, you can see”

[Time Table (dir. Mark Stevens, 1956).]

Railroad detective Joe Armstrong (King Calder) carries a pocket notebook. He digs the written word. There he is, still at it, making notes. Says Joe, “What you write down, you can see. What you see, you can remember.” He likes blackboards too.



Snarky insurance investigator Charlie Norman (Mark Stevens) gives Joe the business: “What’s the matter, Joe? You run out of notebooks?” Joe’s reply: “What you can see, you can remember.”

I recall the detectives of television’s Naked City using a blackboard. Did it happen in real life? I don’t know. But here’s an informed response to the question of whether real-life detectives pin pictures to a board and connect them with string.

Time Table is at YouTube. The film has more than just writing surfaces to recommend it.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

Gregor Z.

[Zippy, January 18, 2018.]

Related reading
All OCA Kafka and Zippy posts (Pinboard)

MLK

From Martin Luther King’s “The Other America,” a speech delivered at Grosse Pointe South High School, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, March 14, 1968, three weeks before King was assassinated:

[W]e will never solve the problem of racism until there is a recognition of the fact that racism still stands at the center of so much of our nation. And we must see racism for what it is. It is the myth of an inferior people. It is the notion that one group has all of the knowledge, all of the insights, all of the purity, all of the worth, all of the dignity. And another group is worthless, on a lower level of humanity, inferior. To put it in philosophical language, racism is not based on some empirical generalization which, after some studies, would come to conclusion that these people are behind because of environmental conditions. Racism is based on an ontological affirmation. It is the notion that the very being of a people is inferior. And the ultimate logic of racism is genocide.

Here is a recounting of the speech and its circumstances from Jude Huetteman, who invited King to speak in Grosse Pointe. Transcripts may be found at Friends’ Central School and the Grosse Pointe Historical Society. I’ve followed the Friends’ transcript in choosing “myth,” not “nymph” (an obvious mishearing: King says “myth” in a 1967 speech); “ the worth,” not “work” (a likely mishearing); and “the ultimate logic,” not “their” (in accord with King’s phrasing in a 1966 speech. I’ve made two small changes in punctuation. In October 2017 the original cassette recording of the Grosse Pointe speech sold at auction for $12,240.20.

An accurate transcript of this speech belongs at the King Center and King Institute, don’t you think?

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929.

Oil and water

From Cervantes’s Don Quixote (2.10):

La verdad adelgaza y no quiebra, y siempre anda sobre la mentira como el aceite sobre el agua. [While the truth may run thin, it never breaks, and always rises above falsehood as oil does above water.]

Found via Nuccio Ordine’s The Usefulness of the Useless (2017), a book I discovered by way of Pete Lit’s quotation of a comment from Rob Riemen’s recommendations for the best humanist books of 2017. I’ve used Samuel Putnam’s translation (1949), which I prefer to the unsourced translation in Ordine’s book (“The truth stretches and grows thin, but it does not break and always floats on top of falsehood, like oil on water”). Putnam cites similar proverbs in Italian and Portuguese:

La verità può languire ma non perire. [Truth may languish but not perish.]

A verdade e o aceite andão de cima. [Truth and oil rise to the top.]

Also found in this book
“The man that hath no music in himself”

[The sentence as it appears in the Italian edition of Ondine’s book: “La verità si stira e assottiglia, ma non si rompe e viene sempre a galla sulla bugia, come l'olio sull'acqua.” I suspect that the translator for the English edition translated this translation, not the Spanish text. Neither the Italian nor the English edition includes Cervantes’s sentence in Spanish.]

What’d they do?

Writing in The Washington Post, Philip Kennicott asks, “What did the men with Donald Trump do when he spoke of ‘shithole countries’?”:

This is the dinner table test: When you are sitting and socializing with a bigot, what do you do when he reveals his bigotry? I’ve seen it happen, once, when I was a young man, and I learned an invaluable lesson. An older guest at a formal dinner said something blatantly anti-Semitic. I was shocked and laughed nervously. Another friend stared at his plate silently. Another excused himself and fled to the bathroom. And then there was the professor, an accomplished and erudite man, who paused for a moment, then slammed his fist on the table and said, “I will never listen to that kind of language, so either you will leave, or I will leave.” The offender looked around the table, found no allies and left the gathering. I don’t know if he felt any shame upon expulsion.

The next New Yorker cover

[Anthony Russo, “In the Hole.” The New Yorker, January 22, 2018.]

More here.

Barack Obama and David Letterman

Now streaming at Netflix, the first episode of David Letterman’s six-episode interview series, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. It’s a disappointment, in several ways. There’s only the slightest glance at the White House’s new part-time tenant. There’s nothing said about how we got from the one president to the other or about democratic or Democratic futures.

But beyond any particular subject of discussion: David Letterman is not an especially good interviewer, not for this kind of interview, not at this length. He seems like a man attempting to play the role of a serious conversationalist. Imagine — just imagine — what Dick Cavett could do with this opportunity.

The best moments: Obama talking about his children, especially about taking Malia to college. Tear-smeary stuff, at least for me.

[The subject of the White House’s new part-time tenant does come up in an interpolated interview with Congressman John Lewis.]

From the Saturday Stumper

A fiendish clue, from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, 11-Across, three letters: “One of a stack of checkers.” No spoilers; the answer is in the comments.

Today’s puzzle, by Frank Longo, is hard, hard. Finishing a Saturday Stumper is always cause for minor self-congratulation.

Inside General Pencil

The New York Times Magazine has a terrific feature on Jersey City’s General Pencil Company. With photographs by Christopher Payne, text by Sam Anderson:

In an era of infinite screens, the humble pencil feels revolutionarily direct: It does exactly what it does, when it does it, right in front of you. Pencils eschew digital jujitsu. They are pure analog, absolute presence.

They are also nice to write with. I so wanted to make this post with a pencil, a General Kimberly (2B).

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Margie King Barab (1932–2018)

Our dear friend Margie King Barab has died at the age of eighty-five. For years, Elaine and I visited Margie and her husband Seymour Barab every summer in New York. And after Seymour died, we visited Margie. Margie was a singer, a teacher, and a writer. She appeared on television in the early days of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as Miss Margie Nebraska and later taught music to children in a Montessori school. One of my last memories of visiting Margie: it was around Thanksgiving, and we were walking with her to her ATM before we had to head off to the subway. It was cold and wet and windy. And somehow the three of us were singing “Tea for Two.”

After Alexander King, Margie’s first husband, died, Margie received a letter from Marianne Moore (November 16, 1966) that included this line: “What was, never ceases in the soul, does it?” I used to share that line (with Margie’s permission) when I taught Moore’s poetry. And I’m sharing it now.


[Our friends Seymour Barab and Margie King Barab, New York, May 2012. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]