“Mother, I’m a poet!”

A detail from Douglas Crase’s remembrance of John Ashbery, friend and fellow poet:

It was October, bright and chilly, and his mother, then seventy-nine, was raking leaves in the front yard. She was not making much progress. She had a scarf wrapped around her head and her nose was dripping. As John came out of the house she said to him — and she had a voice that could rise in a nasal whine to match his own — “John, if you were any kind of a son at all you’d help your mother with these leaves.”

John, his hand already on the car door, turned briefly back and replied in exasperation, as though she should have known better, “Mother, I’m a poet!”

Related reading
All OCA John Ashbery posts (Pinboard)

The daily news, from a historian

Elaine pointed me to daily news write-ups by Heather Cox Richardson, historian. A good alternative to endless television. Richardson’s Facebook page is public, no account needed. Her write-ups are also available as Letters from an American.

“You’re gonna get better”

Donald Trump* today in Tampa, Florida: “You know the bottom line though? You’re gonna get better. You’re gonna get better. If I can get better, anybody can get better. And I got better fast.”

You heartless, hollow fool.

Trump* equals death. That anyone still cheers for this shambles of a human being amazes me.

Naked City exchange names

[From the Naked City episode “Bullets Cost Too Much,” January 4, 1961. Click any image for a larger view. And notice the Public Telephone sign in the second image.]

Ma Bell’s 1955 list of recommended exchange names includes WAbash, WAlker, WAlnut, WArwirck, and WAverly. WAverly, as in Waverly Place and the Waverly Diner, sounds to me like the most citified choice, but I can find no evidence that WAverly was a Manhattan exchange. PLaza is a bonus in this episode. Did you know that the Hotel Pennsylvania still has its PLaza number? 212-736-5000. But the hotel is closed for now.

I love the idea of being able to send a notice (how?) to “all cleaners & dyers.” And I love the idea that a hold-up man whose jacket gets stained as he holds up a bar would think about having that jacket dry cleaned. Maybe even Martinized. It was a different time.

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 : The Case Against Brooklyn : 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 : Loophole : 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) : Naked City (8) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : 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?

Waller Razaf Costello & Batiste

I was trying to pin it down all through Elvis Costello’s “Hey Clockface” — where do I know those chord changes from?

[Elvis Costello and Jon Batiste, A Late Show, October 28, 2020.]

Yes, those changes are from “How Can Face Me?” by Fats Waller and Andy Razaf. Here’s the 1934 recording by Fats Waller and His Rhythm, with Herman Autrey, trumpet; Floyd O’Brien, trombone; Mezz Mezzrow, clarinet; Al Casey, guitar; Billy Taylor, bass; Alvin Dial, drums. YouTube won’t allow it to be embedded. But here it is anyway, turning up at the end of last night’s Costello and Batiste performance. Wonderful stuff.

Bob Woodward, insightful

Bob Woodward, on CNN just now, commented on the Trump* administration’s response to COVID-19, as explained by Jared Kushner in an interview back in April. Said Woodward, “I honestly think this gets to a point where there’s a moral dimension to it.”

Gosh, ya think? And is there also perhaps a moral dimension to the journalist’s choice to keep his knowledge under wraps for months while a book took shape?

A self-owning comment from Kushner in the interview: “The most dangerous people around the president are the overconfident idiots.” Dunning-Kruger!

“This isn’t Wal-Mart!”

At a local business today, the owner attempted to put us at ease: “You don’t have to wear your mask. This isn’t Wal-Mart!”

Elaine decided to mess with him: “We may have been exposed.” Which might after all be true. But we have no reason to think we have been. She was messing with him.

I couldn’t top Elaine’s response, but I did mention the alarming number of cases from yesterday’s tests at a nearby hospital. After which the store owner began to explain that the reason we have so many cases is that we have so much testing.

Dr. Ngozi Ezike, Illinois Public Health Director, speaking today on NPR’s Morning Edition : “The desire by people to believe in things which are comforting but not true is incredibly strong right now.”

If I ever hear “You don’t have to wear your mask” again, I will be tempted to reply thusly: “Well, just between you and me — heh, heh — I’m not even supposed to be back out of the house yet.”

What’s with the Strand?

Three accounts of current events at the Strand Bookstore: this one, from The Baffler, appeared in September; this one, from The New York Times, and this one, from The Washington Post, appeared two days ago.

Somehow I find it difficult to trust a bookstore owner who asks customers to #savethestrand but invests in Amazon, buying “at least $115,000 of stock” according to the Post, “between $220,010 and $600,000” according to The Baffler. The Times mentions an investment in Amazon but with no dollar amount.

Neither the Times nor the Post mentions the larger picture: according to The Baffler, Nancy Bass Wyden, the Strand’s owner, bought “between $3 million and almost $7.9 million” of assorted stocks between April and September. Meanwhile, employees (those who hadn’t been laid off) went without adequate PPE and cleaning supplies.

Mar-a-Lago

That house with the signs and the pool and the lawn furniture all over the place: it would be really immature and small-minded to make fun by calling it Mar-a-Lago, don’t you think?

But also fun.

Buying “shoes”

I was in a shoe store. My total at the register: $501.94. Now there’s a mixture of the mundane and the bizarre, the two poles of my COVID-era dream life.

I think I can point to the source of this dream: some thinking about the difference between buying “a pair of shoes” and buying “shoes.” In this dream I must have been buying “shoes.”

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)