“If you have to write”

[Stranger on the Third Floor (dir. Boris Ingster, 1940). Click for an angrier view.]

Albert Meng (Charles Halton) is angry. The landlady (Jane Keckley) is angry too. It’s a rooming house, not an office building, and Mr. Meng is a good tenant. Why, he’s been living here for nearly fourteen years, and he’s always paid his rent promptly. And now Mr. Ward (John McGuire) is typing at all hours, making it impossible for Mr. Meng to sleep. “Stop using that thing!” says the landlady. And Mr. Meng:


[“If you have to write, write with a pencil!” That’s what he says, honest. Click for a louder view.]

In my student days, I too typed on a manual typewriter at all hours. Didn’t everyone?

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

[Charles Halton is probably best known as the bank examiner in It’s a Wonderful Life.]

Domestic comedy

“I’m so tired of seeing ODE in crosswords. And ODIST. No one calls John Keats an ODIST. He’s from Andy of Mayberry.”

“Isn’t he the one who’s in the jail?”

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All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Wikipedia explains: Andy of Mayberry was the title for episodes of The Andy Griffith Show rerun on daytime television.]

Antigone in Ferguson

Theater of War presents a streaming performance of Antigone in Ferguson:

Antigone in Ferguson fuses a dramatic reading by leading actors of Sophocles’s Antigone with live choral music performed by a choir of activists, police officers, youth, and concerned citizens from Ferguson and New York City. The performance is the catalyst for panel and audience-driven discussions about racialized violence, structural oppression, misogyny, gender violence, and social justice.

Free to watch, August 9, 7:30 CDT. Zoom required. Register here.

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All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard)

“I am someone’s daughter too”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) responds to Representative Ted Yoho (R-FL), who called her, on the steps of the United States Capitol, a “fucking bitch.”

I think of the many times I heard students leaving a college classroom speak of one instructor or another as a “fucking bitch.” “Don’t use language like that about your instructor,” I would say, whenever I had the chance. I wish now I had taken the chance to say more.

“A substitute for home and hearth”

Anna Seghers, Transit. 1951. Trans. from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York Review Books, 2013).

Everything’s a substitute. But hospitality lives on. And it’s not only coffee, sugar, and alcohol that have their substitutes: substitution governs human relations in the novel.

A related post
“Have been and will always be”

Five words

Jesus. Mary. And. Joseph. I’m from Brooklyn — it’s just four words.

Annie Ross (1930–2020)

The singer and actor Annie Ross has died at the age of eighty-nine. The New York Times has an obituary.

Annie Ross’s voice is one I’ve known from childhood. The Lambert, Hendricks & Ross album Sing a Song of Basie (1957) was a household favorite in my early years. Later I bought my own copy.

It turns out that I’ve known Annie Ross’s voice from childhood in a second way, minus Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks. The Times obituary notes that the girl who sings “Loch Lomond” in a 1938 Our Gang short was Annie Ross.

Here’s Annie Ross performing her best known tune, “Twisted,” with her lyrics fitted to Wardell Gray’s tenor saxophone solo from an instrumental recording of the same name.


[Annie Ross, with Count Basie and his rhythm section: Freddie Green, guitar; Eddie Jones, bass; Sonny Payne, drums. Jon Hendricks is snapping by the fireplace. Tony Bennett is digging the sounds. From Playboy’s Penthouse (October 1959).]

Doodles

[A two-page spread of doodles from Russell M. Arundel’s Everybody’s Pixillated (1937). Life, May 24, 1937. Click either image for a larger view.]

All I can say is that I’ve never felt closer to Herbert Hoover. His doodles could be a margin in one of my notebooks from college.

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Words in movies: pixilated, doodle, doodler, doodling

Words in movies

Four words, in one movie, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (dir. Frank Capra, 1936).

The first word is pixilated, which two elderly residents of Mandrake Falls, Vermont, agree describes Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) — and everyone else in Mandrake Falls, Vermont, except themselves. The Oxford English Dictionary definition:

Chiefly U.S. regional. Slightly crazed; bewildered, confused; fey, whimsical; (also) intoxicated.

In the movie a psychiatrist explains:

“The word pixilated is an early American expression derived from the word pixies, meaning ‘elves.’ They would say ‘The pixies have got him,’ as we nowadays would say that a man is balmy.”

Or they might have said that the man was pixie-led. That’s a much older word in the OED. And now I’m thinking of Yeats’s “The Stolen Child.” Come away with us, you stupid human!

Five years after the movie, the folklorist Fannie Hardy Eckstorm wrote about pixilated:

The word pixilated had a nationwide vogue in 1936, following its use in the sound film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Most people probably thought of it as the clever coinage of a Hollywood scenarist; but the student of the local lore of New England knows that is is a well established old Marblehead [Massachusetts] word.

“‘Pixilated,’ a Marblehead Word,” American Speech) 16, no. 1 (1941).

The earliest citation Eckstorm offers (now the earliest in the OED) is from an 1848 campaign song for Zachary Taylor:

You’ll never find on any trip
That he’ll be pix-e-lated.

Three more words from Mr. Deeds: doodle (verb), doodling (noun), and doodler. Mr. Deeds explains that “everybody does something silly when they’re thinking” — playing the tuba, for instance, or filling in the o s on a printed page:

“Other people are doodlers. That’s a name we made up back home for people who make foolish designs on paper when they’re thinking. It’s called doodling. Almost everybody’s a doodler.”

For the verb, the OED has a first citation from a 1937 essay that references Capra’s film. The dictionary has nothing for doodler until 1960 (“Poetry is not the free unfettered self-expression of the doodler”), but there it is, in Mr. Deeds’s mouth, back in 1936.

The word missing from Deeds’s explanation: the noun doodle, which the OED defines as “an aimless scrawl made by a person while his mind is more or less otherwise applied.” As for etymology: “compare Low German dudeltopf, -dop, simpleton, noodle, lit. night-cap.”

And — hokey smokes! — the dictionary’s first citation for the noun doodle is from Russell M. Arundel, Everybody’s Pixillated (1937):

“Doodle” is a scribbling or sketch made while the conscious mind is concerned with matters wholely unrelated to the scribbling.

Arundel’s title makes clear that Mr. Deeds Goes to Town did indeed bring doodle into common use.

But wait — there’s more: from Life, May 24, 1937, a two-page spread of doodles.

[Arundel was quite a character.]

Some stamps

[Nancy, October 17, 1950. Click for larger stamps.]

The teacher has suggested that the children take up hobbies. Nancy has chosen philately. Sluggo is training Reggie’s pony.

“Some,” as in “rocks,” is an abiding preoccupation of these pages.

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All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)