“Etc., etc.”

Beverly Cleary (then Bunn) is now a student in the School of Librarianship, University of Washington. It’s noon:

As we ate our meager lunches and watched drama students, scripts in hand, emote over cups of coffee with soggy napkins folded in their saucers sopping up spills, we discussed the finer points of cataloging and invented an imaginary series of books for our instructor to catalog: six volumes, each with a different editor or sometimes two, one of whom wrote under a pseudonym and the other under her maiden name, some volumes translated from foreign languages and requiring translator cards, each volume with a preface by a different author, etc., etc. This sent us into gales of laughter as each of us thought of an addition to make the assignment more difficult. Such is the sense of humor of librarians. We also had earnest discussions on the finer points of grammar.

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

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A Gmail problem

If you prefer using plain text in Gmail (as I do),
you’ve
probably noticed odd line breaks in sent messages.

That sentence, written in plain-text Gmail, illustrates what I’m describing. It’s long puzzled me. But no longer.

In 2014, Mathias Bynens, who works at Google, explained the problem and suggested a solution: Dear Google, please fix plain text e-mails in Gmail. Today, plain text is still a problem in Gmail. But at least I now know why. And I’ll probably switch to rich formatting. With plain text, it’s too likely that an e-mail recipient unfamiliar with the line-break problem will think there’s a strangely sloppy person at the other keyboard.

Brooks Kerr (1951–2018)

Brooks Kerr, pianist and Duke Ellington scholar, has died at the age of sixty-six. The New York Times has an obituary.

There’s a YouTube channel for Kerr’s recordings, but no trace online of the recording I’d like to link to: Soda Fountain Rag (Chiaroscuro, 1975), a wonderful sampling of early Ellingtonia, with Kerr (then twenty-four) accompanied by a spirited Sonny Greer, the Ellington band’s first drummer (then seventy-nine). Instead, here’s a live recording from 1974 of Kerr playing “Soda Fountain Rag,” generally considered Ellington’s first composition.

Robert Johnson, mortgagor

“She got a mortgage on my body now, and a lien on my soul”: Robert Johnson, “Traveling Riverside Blues,” recorded in Dallas, June 20, 1937.

A related post
Mortgagee, mortgagor

Mortgagee, mortgagor

Ogedi Ogu, a lawyer, is suing Oxford University Press over Oxford definitions of mortgagee and mortgagor. Mr. Ogu says that he suffered embarrassment and loss of reputation when he relied on definitions in the Oxford English Mini Dictionary and the Oxford Mini Reference Dictionary. He says that these dictionaries define mortgagee as a borrower and mortgagor as a lender.

I think he may have things backwards. The Oxford Dictionaries website gives this definition for mortgagee: “the lender in a mortgage, typically a bank, building society, or savings and loan association.” And for mortgagor: “The borrower in a mortgage, typically a homeowner.” The Oxford English Mini Dictionary gives these shorter definitions for mortgagee and mortgagor: “the lender in a mortgage,” “the borrower in a mortgage.” I cannot find a dictionary with the title Oxford Mini Reference Dictionary.

The Oxford English Dictionary too defines mortgagee as “a mortgage lender” but adds a second definition: “in popular usage: mortgagor.” And the OED defines mortgagor as “the borrower in a mortgage.” Uh oh. I am reminded of what happens when someone uses the word nonplussed to mean its opposite. I look forward to further news of this case.

Mortgagee and mortgagor seem to me vexed terms, and writing this post about them has made my head spin, more than once, though I was never left nonplussed. Consider these Merriam-Webster definitions: “a person to whom property is mortgaged,” “a person who mortgages property.” Can you tell which definition goes with which word? Garner’s Modern English Usage glosses a similarly confusing pair, lessor and lessee, and suggests a change: “landlord and tenant are simpler equivalents that are more comprehensible to most people.” I would like simple, clear alternatives to mortgagee and mortgagor: lender and borrower or lending institution and borrowing homeowner would work well.

This post is for my friend Norman, who knows the difference between lessee and lessor and wishes that everyone else did.

[Mr. Ogu says that he has a letter from Oxford University Press and the University of Oxford acknowledging the mistaken definitions. The OEMD that I looked up (in Google Books) dates from 2013. Mr. Ogu says that he bought his dictionaries in 2005 and 2006, so it’s possible that in an earlier edition the definitions were switched. But I’m puzzled that no article about this case has a photo of the relevant dictionary page.]

“Plato: Teacher and Theorist”

History of Education, a prerequisite, holds few memories for Beverly Cleary:

What I do recall is the paper the entire class was required to write on one subject, “Plato: Teacher and Theorist.” The paper had to be twenty-four pages long. Not twenty-three, not twenty-five. Twenty-four. Fortunately, I was fresh from Plato the previous semester, but I resented every word of that paper, every footnote, every ibid., every op cit., and longed to add one footnote, “I thought of this myself.” Footnotes in foreign languages, according to the wisdom of Stebbins, always impressed a reader, but I couldn’t work one in on Plato. Someday, someday, I vowed, I would write entire books without footnotes.

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

This paper and its footnotes were to become the stuff of a scene in the 1963 Cleary novel Sister of the Bride.

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[Stebbins: Stebbins Hall, University of California at Berkeley.]

“Poet voice”

From Atlas Obscura: An Algorithmic Investigation of the Highfalutin “Poet Voice.” You know, that ineptly . . . musical voice? The one that rises? And falls where you least . . . expect it? Poet voice (or as I call, poetry voice) tells an audience that the person reading is a poet, the real thing, because this is what poetry sounds like. One voice fits all.

And now I’m reminded of an observation from the poet David Bromige, posted to the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics List, January 10, 1997. He’s writing about teaching poetry to college students and about the damage done by high school:

They cd only recognize a poem when it was in the missionary position. That a poem might be as opaque as a person, capable of many kinds of caress, much playful laughter, of brooding withholding silences, of orderly thought or persuasive choplogic, of trivial drivel, of witty observations — that it might even be a dreadful machine psychotic — they had not been permitted, though in their years of sturm and drang, to realize.

And now I’m hearing Frank O’Hara in my head: “Lana Turner has collapsed!” Not poet voice: a poet.

Two related posts
Here’s a poem for today : Marjorie Perloff on the “well-crafted” poem

[I’ve borrowed a description of poetry voice from a post about a 2015 Toyota commercial.]

Imaginary elevator

[Two people recognize each other as they wait for an elevator.]

“Oh. Well, hello. About that joke — I have to admit, it’s pretty dated. And I can see how it must have struck you as offensive. I should have realized that not everyone is going get a joke that relies upon knowledge of department-store elevator operators, and that calling out something about lingerie could sound enormously inappropriate. Believe me, I won’t be making that joke again.”

“Well, I’m glad. Really, it’s not my responsibility to instruct grown men about what’s appropriate and inappropriate in public spaces. But your reference to lingerie did suggest, in a rather crass and public way, a preoccupation with women’s bodies. Still, I’m willing to take you at your word that your joke was meant as an elevator joke, nothing more.”

“It’s good to know that.”

[The elevator arrives, the door opens, and they enter.]

“What floor?”

“Notions and Sundries.”

[They laugh.]

Whatever happens in the aftermath of a recent incident of elevator trouble, it is unlikely to take the form that I’ve presented here. My elevator is entirely imaginary.

The ambiguity about who’s making the joke at the end is intended.

Broadening a point

College English with Mr. Frank Palmer, who sports a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch fob:

Mr. Palmer guided us through Beowulf and Macbeth, which I had studied in high school, The Mayor of Casterbridge, biography, essays, and modern American poetry. He required us to learn to spell Nietzsche, the name of a German philosopher I have never had occasion to use. Best of all, he assigned original compositions but instructed us never to use the expression “broaden our horizons” because, he said, “the horizon is the point at which the earth and sky meet, and it is impossible to broaden a point.” I never have, even though I am not sure I agree.

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

It’s smart to avoid “broaden our horizons” as a stale, trite expression. But isn’t the horizon better conceived as a line, at least a figurative one? Merriam-Webster: “the line where the earth seems to meet the sky.” The vanishing point, well, that’s a point.

I hope that this post has broadened all your horizons.

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Proust auction

Coming soon to the Paris Sotheby’s, the Marie-Claude Mante collection of Proustiana:

a major Proustian archive from the library of Proust’s grandniece: 60 lots of letters, books, presentation copies and literary manuscripts. In addition to an unpublished pastiche of Ruskin, galley proofs of À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, a first draft on the source of the river Loir (prelude to a famous part of Du Côté de chez Swann) and an original drawing, the collection includes a very significant collection of letters from Gaston Gallimard to Marcel Proust between 1912 to the author’s death in 1922.

Here’s a more detailed description of what’s for sale.

What I love about this kind of unattainable reality: there is a catalogue of it, in French, filled with photographs, free for the downloading. The Proust material begins on page 125. Thank you, auctioneers.

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