Joe Biden’s stutter

Worth reading: John Hendrickson’s “Joe Biden’s Stutter, and Mine” (The Atlantic ). I knew, vaguely, that Biden stuttered as a child. I didn’t know that his stuttering persists. Reading this article helped me to think about his “gaffes” with far greater compassion.

[An aside: A recent CNN broadcast had Biden on a stage answering questions from an audience. What a difference from his debate performances: he was blazingly fluent.]

William Taylor’s notebook

My heart leaped up when I read this passage in a short piece about William Taylor, ambassador to Ukraine:

Throughout his career, Taylor was rarely seen without a little green notebook, friends and colleagues recall. In it, he took meticulous notes of meetings, discussions, ideas.

A green notebook! Could it be this Memorandum notebook? It seems a good fit: well-made, durable, inexpensive, and with something of a military provenance. (Taylor served for six years in the United States Army.)

And then I saw this excerpt from Taylor’s October 22 deposition:

“Handwritten notes that I take on a small, little spiral notebook in my office of phone calls that take place in my office.”

Spiral. Drat.

But then I went to the deposition itself to look at that passage in context. Taylor is describing three sources he used in putting together an opening statement. One: WhatsApp messages.

“Number two. I’ve always kept careful notes, and I keep a little notebook where I take notes on conversations, in particular when I’m not in the office. So, in meetings with Ukrainian officials or when I’m out and I get a phone call and I can — I keep notes.

“The third documents are handwritten notes that I take on a small, little spiral notebook in my office of phone calls that take place in my office.”

So perhaps his traveling notebooks are, after all, of the Memorandum variety.

You can see the the top-opening version of the Memorandum notebook at work in the 2016 film 20th Century Women.

Related reading
All OCA notebook posts (Pinboard)

The green chairs of Bryant Park

From Gothamist, the story of the green chairs of Bryant Park.

To my surprise, the man behind movable chairs was William H. Whyte, who wrote the 1956 bestseller The Organization Man before turning to the study of urban public space.

A tenuously related post
Whyte on anti-intellectualism in education

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, “John Heard and The Scarlet Letter,” hosted by our son Ben. You can find all episodes of The Rewind at YouTube.

Fiona Hill’s accent

In her opening statement to the House Intelligence Committee, Fiona Hill, former National Security Council official, explained that she is “an American by choice, having become a citizen in 2002.” She came to the United States in 1988 to do graduate work at Harvard:

Years later, I can say with confidence that this country has offered for me opportunities I never would have had in England. I grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent. In England in the 1980s and 1990s, this would have impeded my professional advancement.

This background has never set me back in America.

I find these comments, made by someone who never expected to be a public figure, moving.

[Granted, there are distinctive accents that can and do impede possibilities (employment and housing, for instance) in the United States — for people native-born and non-native-born. But the contrast here is between what would have been available to Hill in England and the United States.]

In Maniac Ridge

I was in Maniac Ridge, New Jersey, uncertain whether maniac was an adjective or a noun. The car needed gas, so I pulled into the garage of a Sunoco station. I popped the gas cap and an attendant filled the tank. (No self-service in New Jersey.) The garage was filled with vehicles in need of repair: a golf cart, a sedan, a bus. I had thirty-one papers with me, all of which needed grading, and I needed to find a place to work.

This is the eighteenth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring, and the third with grading. All the others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17.

[The number of papers probably owes something to J.D. Salinger’s Zooey : “Advanced Writing 24-A loaded me up with thirty-eight short stories to drag tearfully home for the weekend.”]

“A continuum of insidiousness”

“A continuum of insidiousness”: Adam Schiff’s phrase, which expands Gordon Sondland’s reference to Rudolph Giuliani’s ever more insidious demands, interests me. The thing about a continuum of insidiousness is that every point on it is insidious, some just more so than others.

I have to imagine this continuum as existing in both space and time, because Gordon Sondland was in way over his head as he traveled it.

The Musgrave Single Barrel 106

From the Musgrave Pencil Company: the Single Barrel 106, a pencil made from a cache of 1930s Tennessee Red Cedar found “in the wreckage of an ill-fated storage building.” I like the origin story, the design, and the play on single-barrel whiskey. The 106 is one nifty-looking pencil.

Found via Lexikaliker. Or in Google Translate’s English, Lexikaliker.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard) : Musgrave 1930s or ’40s refill leads

Telling the truth

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a few minutes ago, addressing his father: “Do not worry. I will be fine for telling the truth.”

WordPress 5.3: Kirk

The latest version of WordPress, 5.3, is named Kirk, for Rahsaan Roland Kirk.


[“Cabin in the Sky” (Vernon Duke–John La Touche). Kirk, manzello; Tete Montoliu, piano; Tommy Potter, bass; Kenny Clarke, drums.]

Lots of Kirk recordings on YouTube, pre- and post-Rahsaan (a name he added in 1970), but not that many filmed performances. This one is my favorite, found long ago via Music Clip of the Day. Aside from the music — and what music! — I love Tommy Potter’s puzzled look at the end. Who needs a rest?