Walking protocol

Wave to everyone. Wave even to those who never wave back.

A daily walk

“One of the few options for escaping the drumbeat of bad news”: New York Times readers on the benefits of a daily walk.

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10:00 a.m.: The latest bad news, as I’m about to go for a walk.

Woodruff’s Morison

[PBS NewsHour, May 6, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

That book on Judy Woodruff’s right, the one with the blue-gray cover, its spine often partly hidden behind the NewsHour logo — I’ve been wondering what it is. I could make out The Oxford. A dictionary? An ancient guide to usage? I finally realized that the way to an answer was a computer screen, not a television (or at least not my television).

Let us zoom in:

It’s Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People (1965). If you need something to read, it’s at the Internet Archive, all 1153 pages of it.

I once ID’d T.S. Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 on MSNBC’s Hardball. That was detective work.

[Sometimes I have to concentrate on the trivial to cope with the non-trivial.]

Zweig’s Yesterday tomorrow

News from Pushkin Press: Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, translated by Anthea Bell, will be on sale tomorrow, as a Kindle e-book from Amazon, for 99P ($1.23). It’s a great memoir of a lost Europe — pictures of the gone world.

Elaine and I are partial to the dowdier Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger translation, but it’d be silly not to get a copy of this translation as well. We’ve read much of Zweig’s fiction in Bell’s translations.

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May 7: As I discovered this morning, this offer is available only through Amazon.co.uk, whose Kindle offerings are not available in the United States.

Three passages from The World of Yesterday
School v. city : Urban pastoral, with stationery : “A tremendous desire for order” : “Somewhere in the invisible”

Desk organizers

The New York Times has a guide to shopping for desk organizers. Prices range from $19 to $284. LOL. My favorite passage, which quotes “a London-based interior designer”:

“It’s important for your mind to have a really nice desk to work from, so when you come and sit down, it doesn’t just feel like a mess,” Ms. [Kelly] Hoppen said.

That’s where a desk organizer comes in — soothing frayed nerves by establishing a sense of order, with everything you need right where you need it.

LOL again.

But I do believe in desk organizers. Here’s my desk, before and after the addition of a Muji plastic tray for pens and pencils ($7 or so, I think):


[Without. 2015.]


[With. 2020. Click either image for a larger desk.]

You can see, right away, the difference the organizer makes, even if it’s difficult to spot the organizer.

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Jackie Wilson, twice

[Shindig!, October 21, 1964. The IMDb lists Teri Garr as one of the dancers. I think she’s on Wilson’s right. Willy Nelson — who’s not Willie Nelson — is in the white pants.]


[Shindig!, November 6, 1965. If you’re wondering where the Stones are, their performance was recorded in England.]

Jackie Wilson wrote “Baby Workout” with Alonzo Tucker. The song was released in March 1963 and went to #1 on the R&B charts and #5 on the pop charts. Jackie Wilson — Mr. Excitement — performed in five Shindig! episodes and closed two.

[Why is it charts? Were there several charts in each category? Did a song hit the same number on every chart?]

A name for the taking

A name for the taking that might be useful to anyone writing family fiction: Sonny LaMattina. “Sonny” LaMattina. Big Sonny. Ding dang dong. Ding dang dong.

When I was a kid, I had no idea what the words meant. I thought Sonny LaMattina was something like semolina, as in pasta.

Out and about

I had to visit our Toyota dealer for service on our car and to pick up a novel by Willa Cather for a thesis I was directing. I stopped first at a beauty salon/restaurant. A young woman offered to take my jacket. Certainly.

I stood and waited a while, and when I was ready to leave, I walked to the rack where she had hung my jacket. No jacket. I asked if she knew where it was, and she directed me to a booth where another young woman sat wearing a brown jacket with a hood. But that wasn’t my jacket (Lands’ End, men’s, brown, no hood).

Freaking out a bit, I looked for the manager, having realized that my car key was in my jacket pocket. “I have to get to        ,” I told him. He waved someone over to assist me. “What are we going to do?” I asked. “Walk?” Yes. It was a ten-mile walk.

In my waking life, I have all of Willa Cather’s fiction.

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Perry Mason and John Keats A reader writes to point out the “burrs” in Keats’s poem.

“Like a phonograph before its time”

Fernando Pessoa, from text 224, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

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