Ugh

The New York Times seems to have a thing for the poet Frederick Seidel. He’s so edgy, so transgressive, so — what’s the word I’m looking for? Yes, rich. From a recent review, which dubs Seidel a “dark prince of American poetry”:

He writes often about motorcycles. Like his shoes, he has them custom-made. In one early poem, he asked: “What definition of beauty can exclude / The MV Agusta racing 500-3, / From the land of Donatello, with blatting megaphones?” His poems are life force and death wish. He’s the only living poet who could creditably be played by Nicolas Cage in a biopic.

Seidel is eighty-four.

This post is a partial explanation of why I usually skip Times book reviews.

A related post
Strunk and White and Seidel (Also with motorcycles)

Food for Love

A streaming concert, tomorrow night, 7:00 Eastern, Food for Love, to benefit New Mexico residents facing hunger. You can see the full list of participants here.

It doesn’t get much plainer

Representative Stacey Plaskett (D, Virgin Islands), this afternoon:

“The vice president, the Speaker of the House, the first and second in line to the presidency, were performing their constitutional duties, presiding over the election certification. And they were put in danger, because President Trump put his own desires, his own need for power, over his duty to the Constitution and our democratic process. President Trump put a target on their backs, and his mob broke into the Capitol to hunt them down.”

The House managers are making their case with impressive clarity and force. “Trump’s mob,” “his mob”: that’s effective, and true to the facts. Keep saying it, please. It may not change many senators’ minds, but it will certainly register with at least some voters.

How to improve writing (no. 90)

In The New York Times, Lauren Oyler makes a case for semicolons. I was struck by this passage:

That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. And there are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you can; there is absolutely no downside.

Well, there can be. A downside, that is. I’d alter the punctuation of that last long sentence to give its first clause more weight and to join the next two more gracefully:

That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. And there are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways. Semicolons are the rare instance in which you can, and there is absolutely no downside.

But semicolons as an instance? I want to revise a little more:

That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. There are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways. Semicolons let you do so, and there is absolutely no downside.

Or better still:

That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. There are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways. Semicolons let you do so, with no downside.

I’m still not sure what it means here to have it both ways, but I do know from semicolons. In a 2007 post titled How to punctuate more sentences, I wrote:

One caution: it’s easy to overuse the semicolon. As an undergraduate, I often used semicolons indiscriminately; I joined sentences together in long, unwieldy chains; my excitement about tying ideas together carried me away; as you can see in this example, the result is not reader-friendly.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts : All semicolon posts

[This post, which began as a way to call attention to this Times piece, has turned out to be no. 90 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Charles Mingus and Spider-Man

Thinking about Charles Mingus and television theme music made me realize: the theme for the 1960s cartoon series Spider-Man, by Bob Harris and Paul Francis Webster, sounds heavily indebted to Mingus’s “Boogie Stop Shuffle.”

Bob Harris wrote the theme music for Lolita. (Not “Lolita Ya Ya”; that’s Nelson Riddle.) Paul Francis Webster, lyricist, worked with Duke Ellington on songs for the 1941 musical revue Jump for Joy, “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” among others. It’s easy to imagine that someone had been listening to Mingus.

Charles Mingus at Bremen

Charles Mingus at Bremen, 1964 & 1975. 4 CDs. Sunnyside. 2020.

Hope So Eric : Fables of Faubus : Piano Solo [A.T.F.W.] : Sophisticated Lady (Duke Ellington) : Parkeriana : Meditations on Integration

Charles Mingus, bass; Johnny Coles, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet, flute; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums. Recorded in concert, April 16, 1964, Bremen, Germany. Total time: 1:54:46.

*

Sue’s Changes : For Harry Carney (Sy Oliver) : Free Cell Block F, ’Tis Nazi USA : Black Bats And Poles (Walrath) : Fables of Faubus : Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love : Cherokee (Ray Noble) : Remember Rockefeller at Attica : Devil Blues (Mingus-Adams-Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown)

Charles Mingus, bass; Jack Walrath, trumpet; George Adams, tenor sax, vocals; Don Pullen, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums. Recorded in concert, July 9, 1975, Bremen, Germany. Total time: 1:59:32.

All compositions by Charles Mingus except as noted.

At one point, as I listened and made notes, I summarized: LIT! Both performances, all players, were and are lit, on fire and burning bright, in four hours of music that make most (so-called) jazz sound pedestrian and predictable by comparison. A few highlights:

“Hope So Eric”: Also known as “Praying with Eric” and “So Long Eric (Don’t Stay Over There Too Long).” A twelve-bar blues that has always sounded to me like great theme music for an early-’60s cop show. Dolphy plays with extreme abandon here. It’s still inconceivable to me that he would die just two and a half months later.

“Fables of Faubus”: The longest recording of this composition I’ve heard, with extended forays into bits of Americana: “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” “Turkey in the Straw,” “You’re in the Army Now,” and others. Here again Dolphy is the final soloist, and his bass clarinet is torrential.

“Parkeriana”: A collage of themes by or played by Charlie Parker. But also: Johnny Coles spoofs Kind of Blue, and Jaki Byard breaks into stride piano on the changes of “I Got Rhythm.”

“Sue’s Changes”: A multi-themed composition depicting, Mingus said, the changing moods of his partner Sue Mingus. I think of the themes as an urbane promenade followed by a brisk walk followed by an increasingly frantic run. And repeat. Walrath is sharp and precise; Pullen, heady and swirling; Adams, expressionist but always in control.

“Fables of Faubus”: An almost cartoonish version of this mordant melody, complete with backbeat and a tremendously melodic solo from Dannie Richmond, with the horns pitching in. The segregationist Orval Faubus was then eight years out of office as the governor of Arkansas. The updated lyrics mention Gerald Ford.

“Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love”: One of Mingus’s most beautiful melodies, with a strong touch of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and a great bass solo.

“Devil Blues”: And suddenly we’re listening to a blues band, one with an incredible bassist, and with Adams shouting lyrics by Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. This tune was apparently put together to please the crowds at Max’s Kansas City, who wanted vocals. Sheesh.

The kicker: the concerts were an hour (1964) and half an hour (1975) longer than what we have here. Was the rest of the music lost? Or still unreleased?

Related reading
All OCA Mingus posts (Pinboard)

[“A.T.F.W.”: Art Tatum, Fats Waller.]

Downfall

I’m listening to the arguments from Donald Trump**’s lawyers today via C-SPAN, as much as I can bear. Which might not be much more. Bruce Castor is up, and he sounds like the worst college lecturer imaginable — self-involved, stating and restating the obvious, and meandering with a mazy motion like the sacred river Alph in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” And enough with the Everett Dirksen: “the gallant men and women of the Senate.” Aiiee.

Here’s my favorite horrible Castor sentence so far. Read carefully:

“The only thing that stands between the bitter infighting that led to the downfall of the Greek republic and the Roman republic and the American republic is the Senate of the United States.”

*

Stay for the Longfellow. Aiiee.

A January 6 compilation

If you missed the video compilation presented by Representative Jamie Raskin (D, Maryland-8) today, here it is. With sound throughout, it’s far more chilling than the already chilling photographs and silent clips that loop as talking heads talk on cable news.

“Trump’s mob”: exactly.

Domestic comedy

“We must have embarrassed people back then with our PDAs.”

“It wasn’t known as a PDA yet. So we didn’t.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Disambiguation: PDA here stands for “public display of affection,” not “personal digital assistant.”]

“Inexplicable shapes”

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)