Izzy Young (1928–2019)

The folk-music advocate and entrepreneur Izzy Young has died at the age of ninety. The New York Times has an obituary. Here are two paragraphs from an installment of Young’s Sing Out! magazine column “Frets and Frails” (February/March 1967):

Write to Steve Ditlea, WKCR-FM (89.9), Columbia University, NYC, 10025, for full listings of folkmusic shows that include tapings from the Bitter End, the Gaslight, the Feenjon, the Folklore Center and the Washington Square. The most popular show is on Sat. from 7:30 to 9:00 pm. . . . Send your name to Broadside, 215 W. 98th St., NYC, 10025, to aid their petition to bring back Pete Seeger’s “The Rainbow Quest” to TV. . . . Arlo Guthrie’s rendition of his “Alice’s Restaurant” was the high point of the Philadelphia Folk Festival. It sensibly combined elements of his father’s style of talking blues, contemporary notions of the absurdity of human life and protest of the draft in rolling comedy that never lost its sharpness or magical weave.

Belafonte has updated his calypso songs with brass on his latest LP. . . . Capitol has formed a new label, Folk World, to capture part of the “definite folk market, fat and solid”. . . . Now that the Spike Drivers of Detroit are beginning to make it their lead singers have lost weight to improve their image and their girl singer has taken to wearing bras. . . . Why are the Beatles the only group that smiles on publicity shots? Everyone else in Datebook and Teenset feels they have to look dour and hard to be hip. . . . The Loving Spoonful are one of the few groups that are growing up as they become more popular. In fact it’s easier to talk to them now than ever before and their music is not afraid to be happy.

I wasn’t subscribing to Sing Out! in 1967 — I was a kid, with several years to go before becoming a subversive teenager. I bought this issue several years after its publication for a cover story on Mississippi John Hurt. “Frets and Frails” disappeared not long after I began my subscription.

[The Spike Drivers? You can find them in Wikipedia. YouTube has a compilation album and two lip-synced songs — one, two — from a TV appearance. The group took its name from Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues.”]

“Not like the trumpet stop of some ill-made organ”

Tristram has been promising to tell the story of Uncle Toby’s amours with widow Wadman for some time now. The story is finally underway. Here Mrs. Wadman is trying to get Uncle Toby to look her in the eye. She claims to have a mote, or something, there. Danger, Uncle Toby, danger:


Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 8 (1765).

Also from Sterne
Letters for all occasions : Yorick, distracted : Yorick, translating : Yorick, soulful : Digressions : Uncle Toby and the fly : Heat and knowledge : “A North-west passage to the intellectual world” : Paris and Manhattan : Tourism : Plain management

[“Madam”: Tristram’s direct address to an imagined female reader.]

Missing from the SOTU

Climate change, alternative energy, children in cages, the government shutdown, gun violence, violence against ethnic and religious minorities, violence against LGBTQ people, LGBTQ rights, the minimum wage, poverty, the cost of health care, student debt, affordable housing, educational inequality, income disparity, voting rights, opioids, xenophobia, white nationalism.

It took me about a minute to create this list, which is probably longer than the president and his people thought about giving any attention to these matters.

SOTU

Sniff. Sniff. Sniff. Sniff. Sniff. Sniff. Sniff. Sniff. Sniff.

[And his tie is crooked. And he reads so badly.]

More Salinger

J.D. Salinger’s son Matt Salinger tells The Guardian that new work from his father is forthcoming — someday.

When? “When he began work in 2011, Matt never expected it would take eight years.” And: “When I ask how much longer it will take, Matt replies: ‘We’re definitely talking years,’ though, he hopes, fewer than ten.”

Does that mean two more years? Or ten more?

As for the specific claims about new work that David Shields and Shane Salerno make in their dreadful 2013 biography Salinger), Matt Salinger dismisses them:

“They’re total trash,” he says. “The specific bullet-point dramatic quote-unquote reveals that have been made are utter bullshit. They have little to no bearing on reality.”

Included in the Guardian report: a Salinger “squib” (a brief note written on an eighth of a sheet of paper) and several excerpts from letters. The squib: excruciatingly joyful. The letters: a bit ranty.

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

[The Guardian article doesn’t mention Shields and Salerno by name, but their claims about new work are the only ones that have been made.]

Passive tense? Gross!

Terry Gross interviewed Benjamin Dreyer on Fresh Air today. And she referred, consistently, to “the passive tense.”

There is, of course, no such thing. Dreyer consistently said “voice.” But he was too tactful to make a correction. Should be have said something? Elaine and I debated this point while driving.

And Gross’s choice example of “the passive tense” — the “x, y, and z may occur” of pharmaceutical ads — has nothing passive about it. Occur is an intransitive verb. Can’t be passive.

A related post
Dreyer’s English

[My suggestion: Dreyer could have said something during the break, allowing Gross to self-correct when the interview restarted.]

Sharpied

Kellyanne Conway, as heard on CNN a little while ago, talking about Donald Trump’s preparation for his State of the Union address: “He Sharpied up a lot of the passages.”

If Sharpie is now a verb, I suppose it must be capitalized, à la Shepardize. And yes, Conway said Sharpied, not sharpened. Trump’s affinity for the Sharpie is well established. Speak loudly and carry a big pen.

*

February 7: Just discovered that Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage has shepardize: “today, the word is increasingly written without the initial, as the trademark threatens to lose its uniqueness and become generic.”

[Odder than Sharpied : hearing Conway speak of comity, which has been announced as a theme of the address. Is Trump going to attack SNL?]

Plain management

Tristram has become a travel-writer. Watch out, Patrick Leigh Fermor:


Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 7 (1765).

Also from Sterne
Letters for all occasions : Yorick, distracted : Yorick, translating : Yorick, soulful : Digressions : Uncle Toby and the fly : Heat and knowledge : “A North-west passage to the intellectual world” : Paris and Manhattan : Tourism

Dreyer’s English

From a New York Times article about Benjamin Dreyer, author of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style:

Dreyer takes The New Yorker, which he refers to as “a certain magazine,” to task for its infamous insistence on using a dieresis — two dots above a letter — in words with double vowels, like re-elect (“reëlect”) or pre-existing (“preëxisting”). “That certain magazine also refers to adolescents as ‘teen-agers,’” i.e. with the clunky inclusion of a hyphen in there, he writes. “If you’re going to have a house style, try not to have a house style visible from space.”

An Utterly Correct Guide: it’s as if matters of writing are turning into matters of etiquette: which fork word to use. But what’s more interesting to me is that this book appears to be aimed not at “teen-agers” or college students but at an older audience seeking to improve.

[Utterly Correct: yes, tongue in cheek. “The clunky inclusion of a hyphen in there”: delete “in there,” no? Or just “a clunky hyphen”?]

Information ≠ knowledge

Oliver Sacks:

A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century. One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. Half the audience cheered; the other half booed.

Related reading
All OCA Oliver Sacks posts (Pinboard)

[Sacks died in 2015. I wonder how that father and audience would respond in 2019.]