Search Google Books with Alfred

[For Mac users with Alfred and the Alfred Powerpack.]

Alfred is an app launcher and boon companion that performs a dazzling array of tasks. A post from the Alfred blog inspired me, at last, to create a shortcut to search Google Books. Simple, as it turns out. The trick is figuring out the URL that will work.

In Alfred (with Powerpack), go to Features, then Web Search. Add a custom search URL like so:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q={query}

For Title, I used the blindingly obvious Google Books. For Keyword, gob, not likely to be confused with anything else in might type. To use the shortcut, I call up Alfred, type gob, add a space, and type whatever I want to look for in Google Books, with or without quotation marks.

So here’s one everyday task made a lot simpler. Better living through automation, at least sometimes.

[My only connection to the app is that of a happy, paid-up user.]

Subway ways

From Gothamist : “A Brief History Of NYC Subway Vending Machines.” And from The New York Times : “The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before.”

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, “The Pearl Harbor Radio Logs,” hosted by our son Ben. You can find all episodes of The Rewind at YouTube.

“Close enough for jazz”

I missed this bit yesterday, Jonathan Turley revealing his ignorance of jazz:

“You can’t accuse a president of bribery and then when some of us note that the Supreme Court has rejected your type of boundless interpretation, say, ‘Well, it’s just impeachment. We really don’t have to prove the elements.’ That’s a favorite mantra. That it’s sort of close enough for jazz. Well, this isn’t improvisational jazz. Close enough is not good enough.”

I have no idea what Turley means.

“Close enough” is never “good enough,” not in jazz, not in any art. And what is “improvisational jazz”? Some subset of jazz?

And what does “close enough” mean anyway? Close enough to what? If Turley is talking about, say, faking a tune, that’s not “improvisational jazz” — that’s faking a tune, something countless musicians have done in trying to honor a request. (See piano bar.)

But faking one’s way through a piece of music is not what jazz musicians do. The notion that jazz musicians are content to toss off sloppy approximations of ideal musical forms is sad, misleading, and dumb, an insult to the improviser’s art. Jonathan Turley should play with his Goldendoodle and leave music to the musicians.

*

4:17 p.m.: In a comment, Chris at Dreamers Rise identified the likely inspiration for Turley’s comment: the expression “close enough for rock and roll.” New to me, but it’s the title of a 1976 album by Nazareth. The idea: it doesn’t matter if your guitar is in tune, as long as it’s close enough, &c. So as Turley would have it, jazz musicians, or “improvisatory jazz” musicians, don’t care enough to tune up before playing. Sheesh.

*

4:53 p.m.: But there’s also a 1969 album by Johnny Lytle, Close Enough for Jazz. So there’s a pretty well-established tradition of dissing vernacular musics, in seriousness or in self-deprecating jest.

*

6:10 p.m.: But wait, there’s more: in 1956, Stan Freberg made a parody recording of “Heartbreak Hotel.” He interrupts a going-out-of-tune guitar solo with the words “That’s good, that’s good, that’s close enough for jazz.” And it turns out that “close enough for jazz” is a well-established expression. Alan Axelrod’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Jazz (Indianapolis, Alpha Books, 1999) glosses it:

Close Enough for Jazz

The prejudice classical musicians once felt against jazz musicians has pretty well died, but it died hard. For much of the 20th century, many classical musicians looked down on jazz musicians as sloppy and undisciplined.

I’ve been listening to jazz for almost my entire life, having entered the novitiate by the age of three. That might be why I’ve never imagined jazz musicians as sloppy and undisciplined.

*

January 17, 2020: My friend Stefan Hagemann passes along this passage, from a Harper’s article about Liz LeCompte and the Wooster Group, by David Gordon:

I am not surprised when Liz tells me that her father played jazz. One of her mottoes, repeated constantly, is “close enough for jazz.” Ari [Fliakos] laughs at the thought of how often he hears this, but notes the paradox it contains: jazz is a loose form that requires total precision; it is improvisation by people who practice obsessively.

Thanks, Stefan.

“So nice and yellow! ”

Buddy Glass says that his brother Seymour loved horseplay from younger siblings. And:


J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

Johnson on bribery

In today’s impeachment hearing, Jonathan Turley cited definitions of high, crime, and misdemeanor from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. Pamela S. Karlan then added the definition of the word Turley left out — bribery, which appears in the 1792 edition of the Dictionary. No, she doesn’t carry that dictionary around with her, though it would be pretty cool if she did: she said that she was using an online edition. Perhaps this one?



The word bribery does not appear in the 1755 edition of the Dictionary. The definition from the 1785 edition: “A reward given to pervert the judgment, or corrupt the conduct.”

There may have been more dictionary action in today’s hearing — I don’t know, because I’ve stopped watching.

Karlan +3

I would like every witness for today’s impeachment hearing to be Pamela S. Karlan.

“He was a chiropodist”

I’ll set the stage, or the cab. It’s June 4, 1942. Seymour Glass has failed to show for his wedding to Muriel Fedder. In the aftermath, Seymour’s brother Buddy (the only Glass in attendance) finds himself in a cab with the Matron of Honor and her husband, Helen Silsburn (a Fedder family friend), and Muriel’s father’s uncle. The Matron of Honor is furious: “I’d like to get my hands on him for about two minutes. Just two minutes, that’s all.” Buddy has not let these people know that Seymour is his brother. “We were boys together,” he has explained. What, the Matron of Honor wants to know, did Seymour do before the war?


J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963).

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

“Artistically appointed restrooms”

George Baxter’s client has built ten new department stores in his home state in the last ten years. From the Hazel episode “What’s Bugging Hazel?” (February 25, 1965):

“I’ve spent a fortune, George, a fortune, giving my customers every conceivable convenience. Spacious parking lots, gracious restaurants and coffeeshops, baby-minding services, and artistically appointed restrooms!”

“Artistically appointed restrooms!” But it’s not a laughline. Or at least the laugh track doesn’t respond.

[Stuck in the house, getting over a sinus infection, I sometimes get stuck in a TV vortex. This episode is also online.]

Reading in the news

From The New York Times

The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe. . . .

The disappointing results from the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, were announced on Tuesday and follow those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an American test that recently showed that two-thirds of children were not proficient readers.