FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its fourth year. The FSRC year runs from May to May. (The club began after I retired from teaching.) In our fourth year we read twenty-three books (same as last year). In non-chronological order:

Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

Maeve Brennan, The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz

Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock, Clark Gifford’s Body

Clifford Hicks, Alvin’s Secret Code

Yoel Hoffman. ed. The Sound of One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Toni Morrison, Jazz, Song of Solomon

Alice Munro, The Progress of Love

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Arthur Schnitzler, Desire and Despair: Three Novellas, Late Fame, “Night Games” and Other Stories and Novellas

Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and England, Tristram Shandy

Johannes Urzidil, The Last Bell

Credit to the translators whose work gave us access to the world beyond English: David Burnett, Adrienne Foulke, Michael Hoffman, Yoel Hoffman, Michael Hulse, Kathleen Raine, Margret Schaefer, and Alexander Starritt. Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Recently updated

The Avital Ronell story, cont. Student-government members object to NYU’s decision to return Ronell to the classroom.

Mother’s Day

[“Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven children without food. Mother aged thirty-two. Father is a native Californian. Nipomo, California.” Photograph by Dorothea Lange. March 1936. From the Library of Congress.]

I want to say Happy Mother’s Day, but I also want to think about what mothers endure, with and without their children. This photograph is not “the past.”

The name of the mother in this photograph: Florence Owens Thompson.

Morning Edition as madeleine

Robinson Meyer:

Five months ago, I happened to find the Morning Edition theme on YouTube, and as the hi-hat glimmered and the jazz guitar began, I was surprised to find myself transported. Suddenly, I was sitting in the back of my dad’s Mazda sedan, being driven to elementary school, listening to the NPR sports commentator Frank Deford, the car smelling of seat leather and something acrid that I couldn’t place.

The acrid smell, I realize now, as an adult, was coffee. I knew that the Morning Edition theme smelled like coffee before I knew what coffee smelled like. The next day, I bought a clock radio, and I’ve been waking up to Morning Edition ever since.

The context for this reverie: the new Morning Edition theme music. Meyer hates it. Our household hates it too. Elaine hears The Sims (as does someone quoted in Meyer’s essay). I hear the background music for The Weather Channel’s local broadcast Weatherscan.

Thanks, Ben.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Frank Longo has made another terrific Newsday Saturday Stumper. I started with nothing. Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretched far away, until I spied 45-Across, five letters, “‘Quack Shot’ antagonist,” and 58-Across, ten letters, “Persepolis Football Club’s home.” Then I looked back and saw 2-Down, five letters, “Playwright from Paris,” and 7-Down, three letters, “     shot.” The first letters of those answers gave me 1-Across, ten letters, “’85 film about a novice nun.” The rest of the puzzle left me feeling that I’d never get it. But words here and there, and everything fell into place.

Clues I especially admire: 40-Across, three letters, “What mice often hold.” 62-Across, ten letters, “Musical band.” 3-Down, five letters, “Potential spoilers.” 26-Down, seven letters, “Saying ‘I dunno,’ say.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

[With apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley.]

Duke Ellington Live, a review

Duke Ellington Live (DVD)
November 16, 1973
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium
EuroArts Music International, 2019
53 minutes

It’s bittersweet to watch things nearing an end. In March 1974 Ellington would leave the road and check into Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he would die in May. Other musicians from this performance who would be gone in 1974: Joe Benjamin (January), Paul Gonsalves (May), and Harry Carney (October). It was the preternaturally young-looking Carney (nickname “Youth”) who after Ellington’s death famously said, “Without Duke, I have nothing to live for.”

Almost everything here feels perfunctory, with the band playing a short set in a European concert-hall version of a Newport festival. Instrumental solos are minimal; the musician most heard from is Anita Moore, singing “New York, New York” and “Somebody Cares” and scatting in “Blem.” She arrives on stage on the arm of a tardy Paul Gonsalves, whose contributes no solos beyond an off-mic obbligato. Some awkward stagecraft has Ellington introducing the “three bearded ’bones” and asking Harold Minerve to take repeated bows, after which Minerve venerates Ellington with embarrassing jungle-speak. What was that about?

But there are at least four bright moments: the somber piano solo “Metcuria” (unlisted on the DVD package, and marred by audience chatter and shushing through the first few bars, all of it loud enough to distract the pianist), Harold Ashby’s tenor solo on “Chinoiserie” (Ashby was the last great solo voice to join the band), and brief solos by guests Raymond Fol and Claude Bolling on “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Fol makes use of lush Strayhorn ballad harmonies; Bolling begins with a witty collage of Ellington pianisms. My favorite moment in this performance: Ellington and company digging the guests, and Gonsalves laughing so hard at Bolling’s virtuosity that he fails to come in with the rest of the band.

Audio and video quality are exceptional — with many closeups. You can even see the package of reeds behind Russell Procope’s chair.

The program:

C Jam Blues : Take the “A” Train : Creole Love Call : Caravan : In Duplicate : New York, New York : Blem : Chinoiserie : Metcuria : Medley: Don’t Get Around Much Anymore / Mood Indigo / I’m Beginning to See the Light / Sophisticated Lady : Somebody Cares : Take the “A” Train

The musicians:
Johnny Coles, Barry Lee Hall, Money Johnson, Mercer Ellington, trumpets
Art Baron, Chuck Connors, Vince Prudente, trombones
Harold Ashby, Harry Carney, Paul Gonsalves, Percy Marion, Harold Minerve, Russell Procope, reeds
Duke Ellington piano; Joe Benjamin, bass; Rocky White, drums
Anita Moore, Tony Watkins, vocals
Claude Bolling, Raymond Fol, piano

Related reading
All OCA Duke Ellington posts (Pinboard)

Zippy’s Tad’s

[“Red Meat.” Zippy, May 10, 2019.]

There is but one Tad’s Steaks left in Manhattan. The address is 761 7th Avenue, though the restaurant is on 50th Street, flanked by a Tim Horton’s and Bobby Van's Grill. If Zippy is at the Times Square Tad’s, it really must be 1962 all over again.

Here’s an article on the history of Tad’s Steaks, once a coast-to-coast chain. (Remember “coast-to-coast”?) The Yelp reviews for the remaining Tad’s are interesting. “This is the absolute best steak in the city”: well, okay.

Years ago I would have said to Elaine, We have to go there. Today I would say, No, we don’t.


[From Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964). Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
More from Hart’s Guide

Chris Albertson (1931–2019)

The writer, producer, and Bessie Smith biographer Chris Albertson has died at the age of eighty-seven. The New York Times has an obituary.

Chris was a generous person in the world of music. His blog Stomp Off! (still online) offered remarkable stuff from his archives: interviews with Bessie Smith’s niece Ruby Walker, recordings of the Duke Ellington band at a benefit concert hosted by Jackie Robinson, a Charles Mingus television appearance. (Alas, some of the audio and video files appear long gone.) I read everything, linked to a number of posts, commented on occasion, and am now surprised to see that Orange Crate Art appears in a Stomp Off! list of “cyber stops.” I wish I’d known so that I could have said thanks.

Thank you, Chris Albertson, for all your contributions to music.

“The Sudden Departure”

“When a small town loses 100 people in just a few hours, kids come home to find their parents missing”: “The Sudden Departure,” reported by Lilly Sullivan, is a story from the April 19 episode of This American Life.

The situation

From “Viktor Orbán’s War on Intellect,” by Franklin Foer, in the June Atlantic. David Cornstein, a longtime friend of Donald Trump, is the United States ambassador to Hungary:

When I asked Cornstein about Orbán’s description of his own government as an “illiberal democracy,” the ambassador shifted forward and rested his elbows on a table. “It’s a question of a personal view, or what the American people, or the president of the United States, think of illiberal democracy, and what its definition is.” As he danced around the question, never quite arriving at an opinion, he added,
“I can tell you, knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years, that he would love to have the situation that Viktor Orbán has, but he doesn’t.”