Duck Fat

Seen on a shelf: Duck Fat Cooking Oil Spray, $8.86 ($1.27 an ounce).

Toto, I’ve a feeling that we’re not in Wal-Mart anymore.

[But we were.]

A linguist looks at Trump’s tweets

The linguist John McWhorter looks at Donald Trump’s tweets and finds a “blindness to the basics of adult-level composition.” With a contrast to Harry Truman.

Universities without history

“What is a university without a history major?” That’s a question from Kim Mueller, a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point who’s studying to be a history major. Quoted in a New York Times article about the declining fortunes of public higher education in rural America.

Memo to UW-SP: don’t claim to develop “heightened intellectual, cultural, and humane sensitivities” in students, don’t claim to prepare students “to constructively engage in local, regional and global communities,” if you’re prepared to take away forms of learning necessary to those efforts.

One more about Joseph Jarman

When the Art Ensemble of Chicago played at Lulu White’s in Boston (1981?), I caught the first and third (last?) nights but missed the second. On the third night I asked Joseph Jarman, “How’d it go last night?” He could have made a perfunctory reply: nice crowd, warm reception. Instead he smiled and said, with a hint of exclamation, “You have to ask someone who was here.”

In other words, it’s for the listener to answer that question, to make something of the music. Or: I wasn’t here, I was somewhere else, inside the music.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper exceedingly difficult (thirty-six minutes so). Frank Longo can pitch them right over the plate — yay! a hit! — but today’s puzzle, to continue with a metaphor based upon a sport about which I know just a little, is full of pitches that went right by.

For instance, 5-Down, five letters, “Senior in Williams’ English class (1989).” Huh? For instance, 31-Down, four letters, “Cursed royal, possibly.” LEAR? Swing and a miss.

I kept swinging, so to speak, at the same pitches, I suppose, because the puzzle has a finite number of clues, and I finally began hitting. If this puzzle had been a baseball game, I would have had seventy-two hits in more than a hundred times at bat. And now my metaphor has fallen to pieces, like a splintered bat.

Some favorite clues: 10-Across, four letters, “Provider of Wimbledon coverage.” 23-Across, six letters, “Pretend one is 1?” 49-Across, ten letters, “Send elsewhere, in a way.” 55-Across, four letters, “Course in mythology.” And finally, there’s 29-Down, ten letters, “Lead-in to radio silence.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments. (Silence.)

Joseph Jarman (1937–2019)

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Buddhist teacher: Joseph Jarman has died at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times has an obituary.

I was fortunate to see the Art Ensemble of Chicago five times between 1980 and 1985. I remember Joseph Jarman tossing confetti into the air, waving tiny semaphore flags, reciting poetry, and serving as emcee. And playing a battery of saxophones and ”little instruments.”

Here, via YouTube, is a small sample of the Art Ensemble in performance, with Jarman on tenor, alto, and soprano saxophones, conch shell, and little instruments. And with Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie (d.1999), Malachi Favors Maghostut (d. 2004), and Famoudou Don Moye.

[The Times obituary misidentifies the musicians in the 1978 photograph. From left to right, they are Mitchell, Jarman, Moye, and Favors. Now fixed.]

“Hands off my piles”

“So take your tidy, magic hands off my piles, if you please”: that’s Ron Charles, writing in The Washington Post. He means piles of books, and he’s addressing Marie Kondo, she of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. In that book, Kondo writes that she keeps “about thirty volumes at any one time” in her bookcase. Thirty books! When it comes to books, the Kondo-minimum approach is not for me.

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Grammar and Hardy

From Way Out West (dir. James W. Horne, 1937). Lottie Hardy (Mae Busch) to Betty Laurel (Dorothy Christy): “If I didn’t know that Oliver was in Honolulu, I’d swear that was he on the phone.”

Take a look at the fortunes of “that was he” and “that was him” in American English via the Google Ngram Viewer. The fortunes of “that was she” and “that was her” are another story.

[Unlike “that was he” and “that was him,” “that was her” can be followed by a noun: “that was her mother on the phone.” But the history of “that was she” is still pretty telling.]

Recently updated

Words of the year Now with tender-age shelter.

Commence to dancin’

TCM has it, in an excellent print. From Way Out West (1937), Laurel and Hardy dance.