On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

Give this son of a gun eight stars! Lombardo! These people are keeping music alive — helping to fight them damn beboppers. You know, you got to have somebody to keep that music sounding good. Music doesn’t mean a thing unless it sounds good. You know, this is the band that inspired me to make “Among My Souvenirs.” They inspired me to make “Sweethearts on Parade.” They’re my inspirators!

That’s from a blindfold test published as “Lombardo Grooves Louis!” (Metronome, September 1949). Armstrong was listening to six recordings. He gave two, three, or four stars to Roy Eldridge, Bunk Johnson, Woody Herman, Art Hodes, and Benny Goodman. Guy Lombardo outranked them all. Genius confounds.

Here is the 1945 Lombardo recording Armstrong was evaluating: “Always” (Irving Berlin). And here is Armstrong’s 1942 recording of “Among My Souvenirs” (Edgar Leslie–Horatio Nicholls). And from 1930, a surreal “Sweethearts on Parade” (Carmen Lombardo–Charles Newman). Genius confounds.

Louis Armstrong’s recordings are now playing at Columbia University’s WKCR-FM.

Related reading
All OCA Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)
“A Sailboat in the Moonlight” (Guy Lombardo, Billie Holiday)

[“Lombardo Grooves Louis!” appears in Louis Armstrong in His Own Words: Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.]

“I can’t ‘take it’”

In The New York Times, Christopher Gibbs, a corn, soybean, and cattle farmer and Trump voter, offers his thoughts about tariffs: “I Am a Soybean Farmer Hurt by Trump’s Trade War. I Can’t ‘Take It.’”

Farm-to-table

Farm-to-table in four, or three-plus-one:

FARM
FARE
TARE
TALE
TABLE

The addition of a letter makes this sequence a variation on what Vladimir Nabokov called “word golf.”

Fred Rogers documentary coming to PBS

The Fred Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (dir. Morgan Neville, 2018) is coming to PBS in 2019.

Now if only they’d run Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Related reading
All OCA Fred Rogers posts (Pinboard)

[Note: the article I’ve linked to characterizes Angela Santomero, creator of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, as Fred Rogers’s “protégé.” That seems to be the PBS line. Certainly Santomero learned from Rogers’s example. But protégé? Santomero says that she considers Rogers her “mentor from afar.”]

Dunning-Kruger geography

Our president, freestyling:

“I have great respect for the U.K. United Kingdom. Great respect. People call it Britain. They call it Great Britain. They call it — they used to call it England, different parts.”

From Garner’s Modern English Usage:

Great Britain consists of England, Scotland, and Wales — all three on the island known to the Romans as Britannia. (Modern usage routinely shortens the name to Britain.) It differs from United Kingdom, which also includes Northern Ireland.

Some people wrongly think of Great Britain as a boastful name. But it’s not: it’s rooted in history. Great Britain was once contrasted with Little Britain (or simply Brittany), in France, where the Celtic Bretons lived. Although the OED’s last citation for Little Britain dates from 1622, the term Great Britain has persisted (though perhaps not without a sense of pride).

Don’t get me started on the Channel Islands, the Crown Dependencies, and the difference between the British Islands and the British Isles. So many parts!

Related reading
All OCA Dunning-Kruger posts

[The Dunning-Kruger effect: a lack of competence entails an inability to recognize one’s lack of competence.]

Salzberg’s Theory of Pizza

Jeffrey Salzberg is a lighting designer for theater and dance and an occasional college instructor. I learned about his Theory of Pizza from an episode of A Way with Words:

It is better to have pizza you don’t want than to want pizza you don’t have.

Salzberg says that he devised this theory as a college sophomore. He invokes it when explaining to students “the need to be prepared for any and all reasonable possibilities.”

Salzberg’s Theory of Pizza would give someone like Marie Kondo the fits, but I think it makes good sense. Better to have that book on the shelf than not. Better to pack that umbrella than not. You might need it! I think that Salzberg’s Theory of Pizza deserves to be better known.

[The hosts of A Way with Words turned this theory into “Any pizza is better than no pizza.” I’m not sure whether they were joking or really missing the point. See the comments.]

“Thanks to my evening reading”

Salvatore Altamura is reading, book close to his face, glasses on his forehead, when the narrator meets him outside a bar.


W.G. Sebald, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 2000.)

Related reading
All OCA Sebald posts (Pinboard)

The joy of grandparenthood

“I have never felt this thing that stopped my brain, that put all plans on hold, that rendered me dumb”: Jim Sollisch writes about “the particular joy of being a grandparent.”

All I can say is that in every FaceTime screenshot we’ve taken when communing with Talia, Elaine and I look like a couple of deliriously happy nincompoops in one or another corner of the screen.

Sardines in tins and boxes

A Guardian reader wants to know: ”Why are sardines sold in those horrible flat tins that spray you on opening?”

One might also wonder: Why are sardines no longer served from silverplate boxes that, presumably, don’t spray you on opening?

Thanks, Fresca, for the silverplate link.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Beginning King Lear

I was about to teach the first class after a long break. I’d given the students no assignment. So we were going to begin King Lear by reading the play aloud in class. Did the students know that was coming? I don’t think so.

I was in my office before class, with no notes, prepared to tell the class that King Lear is a tragedy and that tragedies are about reversal. I walked to the classroom and got there ten or fifteen minutes late. And then I realized that I did not have a copy of the play. I walked back to my office, grabbed the book, walked back to the classroom, and realized that I had picked up a little paperback history of the New Deal. So I ran back to my office. Along the way, I thought that I should get a key made so that I could use my office after retiring. And then I thought, “What if someone else is using it?” And, “What for anyway?” I picked up my undergrad copy of Hardin Craig and David Bevington’s edition of Shakespeare’s works, ran back to class, and then spent the class time thumbing through the book from beginning to end and from end to beginning trying to find the text of King Lear.

Strange: I dreamed this dream after reading Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time, which collects Vladimir Nabokov’s experiments in dreaming as a form of precognition. And when, out of curiosity, I looked up the Craig and Bevington Complete Works at Amazon (still available for the Kindle), I discovered that the e-book has no table of contents. And when, another day later, I was reading W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, I came across these words: “Again and again, from front to back and from back to front, I leafed through the album.”

[Insert theremin music here.]

This is the twelfth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. Not one has gone well. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11.