John Lewis (1940–2020)

A giant of our country, past, present, and future. The New York Times has an obituary.

From a January conversation with Valerie Jackson for StoryCorps:

“My philosophy is very simple: when you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to stand up, you have to say something, you have to do something. My mother told me over and over again, when I went off to school, not to get in trouble. But I told her I got in good trouble, necessary trouble. Even today, I tell people, ‘We need to get in good trouble.’”

[My transcription.]

“Let’s Work Together,” again

It’s occurred to me that “Let’s Work Together” makes a suitable anthem for these times. The song is by Wilbert Harrison, who recorded it in 1969 as Wilbert Harrison One Man Band. Canned Heat recorded the song later that year with greater success.

And now the Heat has recorded the song again, with William Shatner, for — Lord have mercy — a Shatner blues album. Listen if you dare.

I still think “Let’s Work Together” is right for these times. But I’ll take Wilbert Harrison and Bob “The Bear” Hite over Captain Kirk any day.

Related reading
All OCA Canned Heat posts (Pinboard)

[Extraneous matter: I discovered only recently that the song’s lyrics borrow from two lines of “Don’t Quit,” a poem attributed to Edgar A. Guest, among others: “When things go wrong, as they sometimes will, / When the road you're trudging seems all up hill.”]

Another day in downstate Illinois

From Newsweek : a member of the school board in the town of Shelbyville resigned last night after making racist and homophobic comments on Facebook.

A related post
Where I live

“Hearing an iron rod being sawed”

Another version of the preparations for a nocturnal expedition:


Xavier de Maistre, Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. 1825. In Voyage Around My Room. Trans. from the French by Stephen Sartarelli (New York: New Directions, 1994).

The passage from “I soon noticed” to “I should certainly have produced a masterpiece” is a deletion from a manuscript. The translator explains that he has included it

because the author himself said in a letter that he had regretted that deletion and that “this jest on the baroque names of Ossian’s heroes is no worse than the rest,” and because I myself found the passage too amusing to relegate to an end note.

Also from de Maistre
“I rarely follow a straight line” “Three steps backwards”

[Whatever Blogger’s limit is for image size, I ran up against it in trying to post this passage as one image. The orator Demosthenes practiced speaking with pebbles in his mouth.]

“Three steps backwards”

New room. No servant, no dog. Xavier de Maistre prepares for a second journey:


Xavier de Maistre, A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. 1825. In A Journey Around My Room. Trans. from the French by Andrew Brown (Richmond, UK: Alma Classics, 2013).

This journey includes a theory of infinite worlds (expressed in a single sentence) and a moment of inept flirtation with a beautiful neighbor seen on a nearby balcony (“Lovely weather tonight!”). Wonderful, funny stuff.

*

Later that same morning: As I just discovered, the New Directions edition of de Maistre’s works restores to this passage some sentences that de Maistre regretted deleting. I’ll post that version soon.

*

Here it is.

A related post
A passage from A Journey Around My Room

[Pope: the poet, Alexander. Ossian: the poet-identity attached to James Macpherson’s pastiches of Gaelic poetry.]

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Found via Laura Olin’s newsletter: Circular. Draw a circle and see how close you get to perfect. Caution: highly addictive. Hint: the more pixels you put on the screen, the better. Go slow.

I had to check: it was Henry Dreyfuss who liked to draw perfect circles freehand. He designed the Honeywell Round Thermostat, among many other things.

Fauci, mensch

As everyone should already know, Dr. Anthony Fauci is a mensch. This tweet is just one small bit of evidence.

Word of the day: staycation

The Oxford English Dictionary word of the day is staycation, “a holiday spent at home or in one’s country of residence.” Useful for those traveling around their rooms.

The first citation is from an advertisement in The Cincinnati Enquirer, July 18, 1944:

Better tuck a few more bottles of Felsenbrau into the icebox, today . . . Take a Stay-cation instead of a Va-cation, this year. Trains and busses [sic] are crowded.

And now I’m trying to find a familiar 1940s poster: a man taking a staycation, sitting in an easy chair with fan, radio, iced tea, lemonade, dog, and pipe at hand in mouth. I think this man has taken a vacation from his staycation. No, wait — there he is:


[Albert Dorne, “Me travel? . . . not this summer.” 1945. From the University of North Texas Digital Library. Click for a larger view.]

This man was difficult to track down today — a search for stay home poster now returns images with a pandemic theme.

[I find it odd to think of staycation as meaning a holiday “in one’s country of residence,” but the OED has citations with the word used to mean just that. I wrote a description of the poster before rediscovering it and decided to let my mistakes stay in the post.]

“I rarely follow a straight line”

Xavier de Maistre, A Journey Around My Room. 1794. Trans. from the French by Andrew Brown (Richmond, UK: Alma Classics, 2013).

Sentenced to a forty-two-day house arrest for dueling, aristocrat and military officer Xavier de Maistre (1763–1852) made a grand tour of his room, with his dog, his servant, and his imagination to sustain him. A Journey Around My Room is an amusing, unpredictable travelogue, especially appropriate to this time of life indoors. A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room was to follow in 1825. If you like Laurence Sterne, who, too, refused to follow “a strait line,” you’ll like de Maistre.

The Alma Classics paperback includes both works, as does the beautifully designed New Directions volume Voyage Around My Room (trans. Stephen Sartarelli). For instant gratification, both works are available in an 1829 translation, free from Google Books.

“Bookstores”

Fran Lebowitz, in the documentary film The Booksellers (dir. D.W. Young, 2019):

“You know what they used to call independent bookstores? Bookstores.”