Tammy Duckworth responds

In The New York Times, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) responds to attacks on her patriotism from the Trump* world. An excerpt:

It’s better for Mr. Trump to have you focused on whether an Asian-American woman is sufficiently American than to have you mourning the 130,000 Americans killed by a virus he claimed would disappear in February. It’s better for his campaign to distract Americans with whether a combat veteran is sufficiently patriotic than for people to recall that this failed commander in chief has still apparently done nothing about reports of Russia putting bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan.

Mr. Trump and his team have made the political calculation that, no matter what, they can’t let Americans remember that so many of his decisions suggest that he cares more about lining his pockets and bolstering his political prospects than he does about protecting our troops or our nation.

They should know, though, that attacks from self-serving, insecure men who can’t tell the difference between true patriotism and hateful nationalism will never diminish my love for this country — or my willingness to sacrifice for it so they don’t have to. These titanium legs don’t buckle.

I think Joe Biden may have found himself a vice president.

[For anyone who doesn’t know: as an Army helicopter pilot in Iraq, Duckworth lost both legs.]

Manhattan SPA

Outside a Manhattan Trader Joe’s, every day is SPA day, as residents take amusing action against those who line up outside their building, hours early, talking on their cell phones (The New York Times). There’s an Instagram account.

[SPA: my acronym for “sparring passive-aggressively,” as when encountering shoppers who wear no masks and pay no attention to one-way aisles or social distancing. For me, shopping is now SPA day.]

An EXchange name sighting

[Pitfall (dir. Andre de Toth, 1948). Click for a larger telegram.]

Mona Stevens needs help. But has she given her real number? I can find no evidence that GRiffith was ever a Los Angeles County exchange.

I think that an exchange name in a telegram counts as a dowdy-world twofer.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : Chinatown : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Fallen Angel : Framed : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Nancy meta

[Nancy, July 9, 2020.]

Today’s Nancy turns meta in this second panel, as Aunt Fritzi begins to tell her niece “the story this tree trunk tells.” It’s worth clicking through to see the snapper. If you’re like me, or me, you’ll have to look closely to see it.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[“Snapper”: Ernie Bushmiller’s name for the gag that comes in a Nancy strip’s final panel.]

Florence Price’s “Adoration”

Augustin Hadelich at the piano, with thirty-seven other musicians, performing Florence Price’s “Adoration.” It’s a piece for organ, arranged for violin and piano by our household’s composer and arranger Elaine Fine. It’s a beautiful project. My response to these performances in this year of sorrows is beyond words.

“The usual thing”

Erich Kästner, Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist. 1931. Trans. from the German by Cyrus Brooks (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

Another NYRB rediscovery, highly recommended. The waning years of Weimar Germany: dance-halls, sex, political violence, unemployment, and a moment of crucial decision.

The Nazis were to burn Kästner’s books. A post-war work: Das doppelte Lottchen (1949), known in translation as Lottie and Lisa. It’s the basis for the 1961 movie The Parent Trap and later PT movies.

109 is the new 79

Elaine and I began our Great Pause on March 14. I’ve been keeping track of the days like so:

18 days (March) + 30 (April) + 31 (May) = 79.

And now 30 more (June) = 109. So I add the day’s date to 109. Today is day 117.

Reader, are you tracking time in this way?

Trump* sardines

Christmas presents from Donald and Ivana:

One year, Mary Trump writes[,] they gave her a three-pack of underwear from Bloomingdales. Another year, they gave her an obviously re-gifted basket with crackers, sardines and a salami — with an imprint in the cellophane wrap where a tin of caviar had been.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Creative Black Music at the Walker

From the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis): Creative Black Music, an online archive of audio, video, photographs, ephemera, and correspondence. With the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Amiri Baraka, Anthony Braxton, Betty Carter, Ornette Coleman, Julius Eastman, Wadada Leo Smith, Cecil Taylor, and Henry Threadgill.

Algorithms and rhymes

From The Wall Street Journal : Joel Eastwood and Erik Hinton devised an algorithm to color-code similar-sounding syllables and applied it to lyrics from Hamilton and some of its hip-hop influences. It’s a beautiful demonstration of the element of sound in poetry. There’s also a text box for analyzing a few lines of your own.

Years ago, teaching Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Spring and Fall,” I did this sort of color-coding by hand. We had the poem as a document up on a screen, and I changed colors of syllables and words as my students went through the text. The first lines:

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?

What would the WSJ algorithm make of these lines? I simplified the text, as the algorithm couldn’t cope with “Goldengrove,” “unleaving,” and Hopkins’s stress marks. Here’s what it found:



Not bad. The algorithm missed the long o of “golden.” But it caught the near-rhymes of “gar” and “ver,” and “den” and “un.” I’m not sure what it’s doing with the word “you,” which, along with the “et” of “Margaret,” seems to be the only element in these lines not participating in the play of sound. An algorithm that accounted for alliteration would of course catch more. But again, not bad.

I hope that this WSJ feature remains accessible for teachers of poetry in the fall and spring.

Thanks, Ben.