Orange Crate Art

Thursday, July 11, 2019

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Our son Ben is hosting WGBH’s online series The Rewind, an exploration of the WGBH archives. First two episodes: “Tchaikovsky Waits for No Man” and “Tailgating with Table Linens.” Go Ben!

Genius at work

I quote:

Could you imagine having Sleepy Joe Biden, or @AlfredENeuman99,..

...or a very nervous and skinny version of Pocahontas (1000/24th), as your President, rather than what you have now, so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius! Sorry to say that even Social Media would be driven out of business along with, and finally, the Fake News Media!

The “true Stable Genius” tagged a retired teacher and coach whose tweets are decidedly not in favor of the president.

But the Genius has replaced the above tweets with new ones, with the tag omitted and with “Neuman” now misspelled as “Newman.”

Committee life

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Fake rocks

[“Bushmiller in the Side Pocket.” July 10, 2019.]

Zippy tests these wannabes by asking them if his shoes are styrofoam or penny loafers. One responds by asking Zippy if he wants to play pool. And another admits, “You got us, Zippy! We’re just fake news!”

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[You can read Bill Griffith’s Zippy every day at Comics Kingdom or Seattlepi.com. Or read both and compare!]

E.B. Proust

E.B. White’s observations on style in writing are remarkably close to Marcel Proust’s. White, in The Elements of Style (1959):

Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable.

Not an embellishment, says Proust. Not a garnish, says White.

On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

“Style is not at all an embellishment as certain people think, it is not even a matter of technique, it is — like colour with painters — a quality of vision, the revelation of the private universe that each one of us can see and which others cannot see. The pleasure an artist affords us is to introduce us to one universe the more.”

“Swann Explained by Proust.” 1913. In Days of Reading, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2008).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

“Patently deficient”

From The Washington Post: “A federal judge in New York on Tuesday denied a bid from the Justice Department to replace the team of lawyers on the case about the census citizenship question, writing that its request to do so was ‘patently deficient.’”

Patently Deficient : a book title of the future?

Not “home”

It’s startling to see a The New York Times article refer to Jeffrey Epstein’s 71st Street mansion as a “home.” Just one sample:

The townhouse where the financier Jeffrey Epstein is accused of engaging in sex acts with underage girls is one of the largest private homes in Manhattan, a short walk from Central Park.

No, it’s one of the largest private residences in Manhattan. The article I’ve quoted from calls this building a “home” ten times. The article also calls Epstein’s residence in Palm Beach a “home.”

As Garner’s Modern English Usage notes, “In the best usage, the structure is always called a house.” And: “The word home connotes familial ties.” To apply the word to a structure is a tacky realtor move. To apply the word to structures given over to sexual exploitation and trafficking is beyond grotesque.

Epstein is now living in a new “home,” larger but also much smaller than 9 E. 71st Street. If he’s denied bail and found guilty, he’ll be in that new “home” (aka “the big house”) for quite some time. Here’s hoping.

Related posts
Houses, homes, legs, limbs : “Nine homes”

Word of the day: obbligato

The word of the day, or of my day, because I just learned all about the word’s origins, is obbligato.

As an adjective, used as a direction in music: “not to be omitted : obligatory.” As a noun: “an elaborate especially melodic part accompanying a solo or principal melody and usually played by a single instrument.” The adjective came first, in 1740: “borrowed from Italian, ‘obligatory, essential to a musical composition,’ from past participle of obbligare “to require (someone to do something), oblige,” going back to the Latin obligāre. The noun came along in 1825.

An obbligato is not ad libitum, “omissible according to a performer's wishes.” A performer has an obligation to the obbligato. And who knew that ad lib is a short form of ad libitum, an adverb (1606) and adjective (1786) meaning (as it did in medieval Latin) “in accordance with one’s wishes.” The idea of spontaneous performance came later, in the adjective ad-lib (1819) and the verb ad lib (1910).

Not all obbligatos are a matter of obedience to notation. In improvised music, an obbligato — say, a Lester Young obbligato behind Bille Holiday — might very well be ad libbed. And beautiful.

[Definitions and etymologies from Merriam-Webster. “A Sailboat in the Moonlight” (Carmen Lombardo–John Jacob Loeb): Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra: Buck Clayton, trumpet; Edmond Hall, clarinet; Lester Young, tenor sax; James Sherman, piano; Freddie Green, guitar; Walter Page, bass; Jo Jones, drums. Recorded in New York, June 15, 1937.]