Alex Katz’s piano

In 2013, the painter Alex Katz told an interviewer that he ate instant oatmeal for breakfast and sardines for lunch. And now an article in Women’s Wear Daily notes that Katz “eats the same thing most days, taking cereal for breakfast and a can of sardines for lunch.”

Art, check. Sardines, check. But if I ever happen to meet Alex Katz, I will have a third topic of conversation up my sleeve: we have the same model Beckwith piano at home. Look: that’s our Beckwith too.

Other Alex Katz posts
Painter, eater : Focusing : Meeting Lionel Hampton

Misspelling history

It’s Black History Month, yes, and the office of the White House press secretary has misspelled Frederick Douglass’s last name.

Reality TV and the White House

Raj Shah, White House principal deputy press secretary, a few minutes ago: “Omarosa was fired three times on The Apprentice, and this is the fourth time we let her go.”

“We”?

The blurred line between reality TV and the White House could not be clearer.

[Omarosa Manigault Newman has been in the news today, warning that life under Dunning K. Trump is “not going to be okay.”]

Renoir sardines

[Julien Carette and Jean Gabin in La Bête humaine (dir. Jean Renoir, 1938).]

This railroad engineer (Gabin, right) is generous. But his fireman is no fan of the noble sardine. His loss.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Separated at birth

 
[Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak.]

We were watching Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938), and there was Renoir himself as Cabuche — or Steve Wozniak.

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Bérénice Bejo and Paula Beer : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Henry Daniell and Anthony Wiener : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Don Lake and Andrew Tombes : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

Bushmiller, Strunk, and Wilde

A detail from Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s How to Read “Nancy”: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2017): at a meeting of the National Cartoonists Society, Ernie Bushmiller asked for the floor and delivered what a fellow cartoonist described as “an impassioned speech” in favor of fewer words in comic strips.

Bushmiller would have liked William Strunk Jr.’s exhortation in The Elements of Style to “omit needless words”:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

The Elements of Style, revised and expanded by E.B. White, became an American best-seller in 1959. Might Bushmiller have read that new edition? Might it have prompted his speech? There’s no date given for the cartoonists’ meeting, but Karasik and Newgarden reproduce a 1962 Peanuts strip that seems to be a comment on Bushmiller’s criticism. If Bushmiller read The Elements of Style, he would have found in Rule 17 (“Omit needless words”) a confirmation of his long-established habits of work. “No unnecessary words,” “no unnecessary lines”: that sounds like a description of Nancy.

Karasik and Newgarden describe Bushmiller as ever exacting about words:

Toward the end of his life, stricken with Parkinson’s disease, Nancy’s creator required additional help to keep his strip on schedule. Al Plastino, one of the most capable chameleons of the comics, who was hired to execute the Sunday strip, recalls, “Bushmiller would call me up and tell me to take out a word didn’t like. Then he’d call up five minutes later to tell me to put it back in. That he’d call up again and tell me to replace it with another word. He’d call me ten to twenty times a day!"

This story puts me in mind of Oscar Wilde, not Gustave Flaubert, removing a comma in the morning, reinstating it in the afternoon. But Bushmiller worked faster.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy and Strunk and White posts

[Elsewhere in How to Read “Nancy” , Karasik and Newgarden cite Rule 17 as a model for the cartoonist: “Faulkner’s prose is usually full of vigor but not necessarily concise. Rembrandt’s most vigorous drawings often contain numerous ‘unnecessary’ lines. But when it comes to comics, Strunk and White were right on the money.” Speculation about Bushmiller and The Elements of Style is all mine.]

Colorizing old strips

[Peanuts, February 10, 1971.]

One problem with colorizing old strips: art may lose the power of suggestion. Look at what’s happened to the telephone table. Aaugh.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

[Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts.]

Treason?

I didn’t clap during the State of the Union address. Then again, I didn’t watch. On purpose. I would rather have watched LA to Vegas, preempted last Tuesday, on again tonight. If that be treason, make the most of it. It’s a good show.

Grammar in the writing center

Lori Salem, a college writing-center director, points to one more way in which higher education reproduces economic and social inequality: “the very students who are most likely to visit the writing center are the ones who are least likely to be served by our traditional pedagogical practices.” One problem with those practices: writing centers typically treat matters of grammar and usage as “lower order” concerns.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has placed its interview with Salem behind the paywall. But here is an excerpt from Salem’s 2016 paper “Decisions . . . Decisions: Who Chooses to Use the Writing Center?”:

Treating grammar/correctness as a “lower order” or “later order” concern means that frequently we do not address grammar much (or at all) in our tutoring sessions. For privileged students who grew up in homes where a white, middle-class version of English was spoken, this approach might be okay. But affecting a genteel disregard for grammar concerns makes no sense if we are working with English language learners, with students who spoke a less-privileged version of English at home, or with any student who feels anxious about grammar. If we regularly dismiss or defer (“later”) students’ questions about grammar, this doesn’t make those questions go away, nor does it fundamentally alter the terms on which grammar is understood in the university or in society. It simply leaves students up to their own devices to deal with those questions.

I’m reminded once again of Bryan Garner’s observation: “Standard English: without it, you won't be taken seriously.” To dismiss or defer a student’s questions about grammar is to do that student a disservice.

A related post
W(h)ither grammar

[The quotation in this post’s first sentence is from the 2016 paper. The distinction between “higher order” and “lower order” concerns appears to originate in Thomas J. Reigstad and Donald A. McAndrew’s Training Tutors for Writing Conferences (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1984): “After tutors have addressed the higher order concerns [thesis, tone, organization, development], they turn to LOCs [lower order concerns], concerns that deal with units of sentence length or smaller. The emphasis shifts from the draft as a whole to sentence structure, punctuation, usage, and spelling.”]

John Mahoney (1940–2018)

The actor John Mahoney has died at the age of seventy-seven. He is best known for playing Martin Crane in the television series Frasier. Mahoney is less known for having taught English at Western Illinois University. Here is an obituary that notes both endeavors.

Our household has an abiding affection for Frasier and its people.