Fingers or numbers

Elaine and I wondered while walking: which meaning of digit came first, finger, or number?

Answer: number.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates that meaning (“a whole number less than ten,“ &c.) to about 1400. Fingers (and thumbs and toes) don’t come along until 1644.

The word digit derives from the classical Latin digitus, which means “finger, finger’s breadth.” In post-classical Latin digitus also means “each of the numerals below ten.” And whence digitus? The OED doesn’t know (“of uncertain origin”) but suggests that the word probably comes from a variant of the same Indo-European base as the obsolete English verb tee, “to accuse.” And so I think of the children’s song: Where is pointer? Where is pointer? Here I am.

And why digitalis? Because of its finger-like flowers.

On an unrelated note, I am happy to see that the OED has a place for Clueless: “Look, he’s getting her digits!”

A tenuously related post
P Is for Pterodactyl

A calendar for Sluggo

[Nancy, January 4, 1955.]

Sluggo, those 1955 calendars will no longer do. You can get the latest model right here, before the new year begins. Act today!

A 2019 calendar

I’ve been making and sharing yearly calendars since 2010, when I realized that I could get something like the look of a Field Notes calendar for the cost of my own labor — and I work cheap.

Here, via Dropbox, is a calendar for 2019, three months per page. It’s made with Gill Sans and has minimal markings: New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and a special mystery day. Highly readable, even across a crowded room.

About the mystery day: it’s not a personal day, not a family day. But it is a birthday. The date color is meant to suggest wheat. Say, why not download the calendar and try to suss out the mystery?

“Reserve your strength”

Brooke Gladstone, on presidential utterances:

If his reality is not your reality, resist the temptation to repost his missives. Reposting only reinforces them. Instead, note them, mark them, and you will be better equipped to hang onto your own [reality].

Having decoded his tweets and speeches, it would be wiser not to dwell on them too much. In times of stress, there's no point spiking your cortisol levels by fulminating on petty lies, tantrums, or hypocrisies. . . . Preserve your outrage for issues that reflect your values. Reserve your strength. [Ellipsis added.]

The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time (New York: Workman, 2017).

Yesterday’s misspelling: just a bright shiny weapon of mass distraction.

Self-discovery

From a New York Times explanation of how to turn off location services, a complement to a report on the lucrative business of location tracking:

If you want to disable location tracking entirely, toggle the “Location Services” setting to off. With location services switched off entirely, you may not be able to use certain services, such as finding yourself on a map.

There are other ways to find yourself.

[My choice is to disable location services entirely. I’ll use tracking with Google Maps if I have to. But not all map use requires tracking.]

Charles Mingus, Jazz In Detroit

Charles Mingus. Jazz In Detroit / Strata Concert Gallery / 46 Selden. BBE. 2018.

Pithecanthropus Erectus : The Man Who Never Sleeps : Peggy’s Blue Skylight : Celia : C Jam Blues : Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk : Dizzy Profile : Noddin’ Ya Head Blues : Celia (alternate take) : Dizzy Profile (alternate take)

Charles Mingus, bass : Joe Gardner, trumpet : John Stubblefield, tenor : Don Pullen, piano : Roy Brooks, drums, saw. All compositions except “C Jam Blues” (Duke Ellington) by Charles Mingus. Recorded February 13, 1973.

This five-CD set presents music from the opening performance of a five-day residency at Detroit’s Strata Concert Gallery, 46 Selden Street. The performance was broadcast live on a local public-radio station, whose tapes ended up with Roy Brooks. And now, forty-five years later, everyone can tune in to three-and-a-half hours of music and another forty-five minutes of conversation with Brooks and radio announcer Bud Spangler.

The music herein is excellent, a mix of favorites (“Pithecanthropus Erectus,” “Peggy’s Blue Skylight,” “Celia,” “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk”), some Ellingtonia (“C Jam Blues”), and three rarities (“The Man Who Never Sleeps,” “Noddin’ Ya Head Blues,” and the otherwise unrecorded “Dizzy Profile,” a delicate waltz written for Dizzy Gillespie). The band is tight, shifting effortlessly from collective tumult to stately ensemble passages. Though Joe Gardner and John Stubblefield are more than capable players, Don Pullen is the standout, creating solos that move from crystalline single-note streams to gospel-tinged harmonies to wild flurries up and down the keyboard. Roy Brooks, the hometown favorite, is a busier drummer than Mingus stalwart Dannie Richmond: think Elvin Jones. Brooks also plays a mean saw on “Noddin’ Ya Head Blues.” The one musician who seems to be missing: Mingus, who contributes just two short solos and is sometimes hard to hear in the mix. “Is he soloing much these days?” Spangler asks Brooks in an interview. “Uh, no,” is the reply.

It’s both exciting and sobering to hear this band playing for an audience. The applause suggests a small, intensely appreciative crowd: when Mingus says “Thank you,” someone replies, “You’re welcome.” Spangler exhorts radio listeners to show up: $4 in advance, $5 at the door. A call goes out over the air for an amplifier, presumably for Mingus’s bass. The economics of music can be precarious.

Thank goodness that Hermione Brooks, Roy Brooks’s wife and, later, widow, held on to these tapes. Jazz in Detroit, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles (ECM), and The Savory Collection (Mosaic) are my records of the year.

Related reading
All OCA Charles Mingus posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

[Re: white vermouth as an ingredient in cooking.]

“It adds a certain je ne sais quoi.”

“Oh I don’t know about that.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

“Water Images of The New Yorker”

I’m delighted to see that Harper’s has Charles Bernstein’s “Water Images of The New Yorker” online. It’s a funny take on what Bernstein terms “official verse culture.”

[I’m resisting the urge to go through our household’s three or four months’ worth of The New Yorker to see if anything has changed since 1989.]

A few lines of bad poetry

From The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, edited by D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (1930), lines from William Wordsworth’s poem “Liberty”:

The beetle loves his unpretending track,
The snail the house he carries on his back;
The far-fetched worm with pleasure would disown
The bed we give him, though of softest down.

That’s as close as I can come (after a few glances) to the cloying personifications in lines of contemporary poetry I heard on NPR.

The Stuffed Owl is still in print from New York Review Books, minus eight Max Beerbohm illustrations. An added pleasure of this anthology: Lewis and Lee title each excerpt. (The lines from “Liberty” are titled “Insensibility.”) Another added pleasure: the book’s subject index. For instance: “Beetle, flight of, described, 15; not addicted to vagabondage, 150.” And “Owl, stuffed, emotions evoked by contemplation of, 151.” “The Stuffed Owl,” too, is by Wordsworth.

Remembering The Stuffed Owl prompts me to revise what I wrote about bad poetry: it’s bad poetry presented as legitimate art that makes me groan and wince. Bad poetry presented as such makes me smile and laugh.

See also a woodpecker looking for a gift and Marjorie Perloff’s commentary on the “‘well-crafted’ poem.”

[Who decides what’s bad? We all do.]

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