From the Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Frank Longo, is a tough one. I had to look up three answers to finish: a bit of crosswordese, a fairly obscure quotation, and a term that left me baffled, ending in BOX. (A what?)

Two clues that I especially liked: 1-Across, four letters: “Galaxy cluster.” And 11-Down, four letters: “Joiner of many clubs?”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, July 7, 2018. Click for a much larger view.]

I doubt that Nancy has ever stepped into a church. Or if she has, it was probably to “borrow” a dime from the collection box (for a soda). Or candles for Sluggo’s birthday cake. Or something. All that aside: today’s strip is a pleasing assembly of comic-strip characters, all of whom attend a Christian house of worship with non-representational stained-glass windows. From front to back, left to right, I see Nancy, Curtis Wilkins, Dennis the Menace, Mary Worth, Archie Andrews, Earl Pickles (where’s Opal?), Popeye the Sailor, Perfesser Cosmo Fishhawk (Shoe), and Dick Tracy. The couple in the second row, the guy with the red tie, and the angry-looking bird: no idea. Anyone? A little help?

A mystery of the Hi and Lois interstice: the guy with the red tie changes his seat between the first and second panels.

July 8: Eric Reaves, the strip’s artist, explained in a comment at Comics Kingdom: “The couple is my wife and I (the artist of the strip). The red tie guy is a character I created many years ago for a rejected comic strip idea, and the lady in purple is my grandmother!”

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

[Perhaps that bird is an Angry Bird. The Angry Birds now have a comic strip.]

Beautiful libraries

From the BBC, some of the world’s most beautiful libraries.

The most beautiful library I’ve ever used: Fordham University’s Duane Library, with tiers, nooks, crannies, passageways, mysterious doors, and spiral staircases. Here is a 1951 photograph that gives a good idea of the library’s main space. Dig the tiers! (When I was a student, tables alternated with the shelves, making for cozy little workspaces.) And here are recent photographs of the remodeled multi-purpose Duane, tiers and shelves removed, no longer a library. I liked working in the little room with the spiral staircase, which I think was in the Bs: philosophy. What’s the most beautiful library you know?

“All coming out of a tube”

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz. 1929. Trans. Michael Hoffman (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).

A great novel, and not nearly as intimidating as you might think.

Related reading
All OCA Döblin posts (Pinboard)

Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018)

“A relentless interviewer, he used whatever it took — filming surreptitiously, posing as a French historian trying ‘to set the record straight’ — to pry astonishing stories out of his subjects”: the journalist and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann has died at the age of ninety-two. The New York Times has an obituary.

Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah is available from Netflix.

[“The New York Times has an obituary”: how I hate typing those words.]

Henry Butler (1948–2018)

The pianist and singer Henry Butler has died at the age of sixty-nine. The New York Times has an obituary.

Henry lived and taught in our university town in the 1990s. He was often away, on leave to perform or record. He gave a concert here in which he played solo piano — I remember “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and “Yesterdays” — and sang an Italian aria. He was a pianist of tremendous intensity, and a great unhurried conversationalist, with a dry sense of humor. When Elaine and I had Henry over for dinner, I picked him up at his house, where I noticed a copy of Robert Johnson’s Complete Recordings out for listening. I remember that after dinner Henry told us a story about driving a car and getting pulled over by the police. (I should mention that Henry was blind.) We played a duet or two for him, guitar and violin, probably “Pennies from Heaven.” We didn’t own a piano at the time.

Here’s Henry Butler at the Library of Congress, talking and performing.

The Gateway

A six-part podcast series from Gizmodo: The Gateway, about Teal Swan, self-described “spiritual catalyst.” All episodes are now available, and they make for compelling listening, though there’s less of a narrative arc than the mysterious music and audio effects might lead you to expect. And Jennings Brown, the podcast’s creator, has an annoying habit of left dislocation that I was unable to unnotice.

I have two questions and no answers: Why is there no Wikipedia article about Teal Swan? And why does Google include in its capsule biography claims from Swan herself? This sentence, for instance, which appears in descriptions accompanying some of her YouTube videos:

Teal Swan was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico with a range of extrasensory abilities, including clairvoyance, clairsentience, and clairaudience.

Thanks a lot, Google.

[About left dislocation: I think of scripted podcast reportage as writing, not speech. Left dislocation sounds conspicuously informal there.]

The Fourth

[“Hungarian refugee Irene Csillag pledging allegiance to new flag on first day in American school.” Photograph by Carl Mydans. Indianapolis, Indiana. December 1956. From the Life Photo Archive. This photograph appeared in a Life story, “They Pour In . . . And Family Shows Refugees Can Fit In” (January 7, 1957). The principal at the Csillag children’s school: “They’re not the first to come here, strangers to the country and to English, and soon be at home.”]

I’ve had a Jasper Johns work, Flag on Orange, ready for months. But on this Fourth of July, I’m reposting a photograph that I posted in 2016. Let’s learn from our American past.

“The Immigrants”

A new recording from Gaby Moreno and Van Dyke Parks: “The Immigrants.” The song is by the calypsonian David Rudder. Background at NPR. Proceeds from downloads and streaming go to the Central American Resource Center of California.

Five questions

The Washington Post asks “the five hardest questions in pop music.” I am happy to provide answers:

1. The question stacks the deck, but yes.
2. Yes.
3. Yes.
4. With open ears.
5. Yes and no.