Steam heat

“Turn-of-the-century faith in ventilation to combat disease pushed engineers to design steam heating systems that still overheat apartments today”: “Your Old Radiator Is a Pandemic-Fighting Weapon” (Bloomberg).

Open windows in winter? A feature, not a bug. With an explanation of why radiators are painted silver.

Naked City at YouTube

Holy cow: the complete run of Naked City is available at YouTube. Here is a taste, twenty (of 138) episodes that I highly recommend. Keep in mind: I set out to make a list of five, then ten. There are too many good ones.

“Sidewalk Fisherman” Based on a New Yorker article by Meyer Berger.

“Bullets Cost Too Much” Detective Adam Flint: villain or hero?

“A Hole in the City” Sylvia Sidney, Robert Duvall, and Yankee Stadium.

“Show Me the Way to Go Home” Lois Nettleton and other wanderers.

“The Face of the Enemy” PTSD.

“One of the Most Important Men in the World” Faustian and Trumpian.

“A Case Study of Two Savages” Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate take Manhattan.

“Today the Man Who Kills Ants Is Coming” A police officer’s breakdown.

“The One Marked Hot Gives Cold” Verges on matters that could never be made explicit in 1962.

“The Multiplicity of Herbert Konish” Crazy, man. And Detective Flint recites Emily Dickinson.

“The Rydecker Case” He said, she said.

“Hold for Gloria Christmas” Poetry and the Village. With Burgess Meredith and Alan Alda as poets.

“Idylls of a Running Back” Who is Sandy Dennis after all?

“A Horse Has a Big Head — Let Him Worry!” A nearly blind boy makes his way through the city.

Beyond This Place There Be Dragons Frank Gorshin on the run. The final scene is heartbreaking.

“Prime of Life” Capital punishment. They were pushing all envelopes as this series moved to its end.

“Bringing Far Places Together” Immigrants in the city.

“Carrier” Sandy Dennis again. Strange viewing in the time of COVID-19.

“Golden Lads and Girls” The class system and alcohol.

“Barefoot on a Bed of Coals” A meta ending to the series. With tossed soup.

If you get hooked, it still makes sense to buy the 29-DVD set — it’s a bargain.

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On Money Jungle

In The Paris Review, Matt Levin writes about Money Jungle, the (killer) 1962 album by Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach: “A Masterpiece of Disharmony.”

Masterpiece? Yes. Disharmony? I’m not convinced. Tumult, certainly, and the shift from the tumultuous “Money Jungle” to the serene “Fleurette Africaine” is one of the oddest choices in sequencing I know. But guess what? Those two tracks are both twelve-bar blues. One form, many possibilities.

Thanks, Chris.

[Track three, “Very Special,” is a twelve-bar blues as well, as are other tracks from the session.]

Proust for two

If I were CNN, this post would begin, “We are now less than ten minutes away from the start of.”

And if I were Rocky and Bullwinkle, this post would continue, “In Search of Lost Time, or That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles.”

The ascent of Mount Proust is the Four Seasons Reading Club’s greatest challenge to date. Wish us well.

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A storybook house

The house of Emile Verhaeren, poet:

Stefan Zweig, “Memories of Emile Verhaeren.” 1917. Encounters and Destinies: A Farewell to Europe. Trans. Will Stone (London: Pushkin Press, 2020).

I’m keen on Zweig as a writer of fiction and memoir. But the essays in this compilation, all tributes to “great” persons, are little more than empty, overwrought praise. This description, and a brief description of Verhaeren’s work table — “a student’s inkwell, a cheap ashtray, stationery in a cigar box, and that was it” — are my favorite passages in this book.

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Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Recognize her? Leave your answer in the comments. This ID is easy, I think. But I’m surprised to see this actor in black and white.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” I use actor.]

Santa Clause

That’s his name, in a genuine headline: “Santa Clause has come to town.”

The elves must be his subordinates.

Elaine suggests that retailers are his dependents.

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Happy birthday, Willa Cather

Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873. From a letter to her lifelong friend Carrie Miner Sherwood, January 27, 1934:

Now I don’t often write, even to my dearest friends, about my own work, but you just tuck this away where you can read it and when people puzzle you, or come at you and say that I idealize everything and exaggerate everything, you can turn to this letter and comfort yourself. The one and sole reason that my “exaggerations” get across, get across a long way (Antonia has now been translated into eight languages), is that these things were not exaggerations to me. I felt just like that about all those early people. If I had exaggerated my real feeling or stretched it one inch, the whole book would have fallen as flat as a pancake, and would have been a little ridiculous. There is just one thing you cannot fake or counterfeit in this world, my dear Carrie, and that is real feeling, feeling in people who try to govern their hearts with their heads.

I did not start out to write you a long lecture, but someday I might get bumped off by an automobile, and then you’d be glad to have a statement which is just as true as I have the power to make it.

                                    My heart to you always,
                                                               Willie

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

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Teaching writing by the sentence

“Two teachers show how their middle and high school students work with sentence structure using New York Times models. They also pose a sentence-writing challenge for your students”: “Sentences That Matter, Mentor and Motivate” (The New York Times).

William Carlos Williams wrote that “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” So too a sentence. To become a better writer is to understand these machines: the kinds of work they can do and the contribution of each part to the whole.

I like the model of instruction described in this Times article. When I taught upper-level writing classes, we’d sometimes spend an entire fifty minutes working on a handful of student sentences in need of revision. Remove this word? Put it here? Replace it? Turn the parts around? That attention to the sentence fosters the healthy writerly self-consciousness that makes every word a choice subject to change.

[Williams: from the introduction to The Wedge (1944): “To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.” Omit needless words!]

2020

“Sometimes, I just stare at the stars on a cold, wintry night and pretend 2020 never happened”: from today’s Zippy.

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