Our tube

Michael Ansara, Jane Greer, Clifton James, Martin Milner, Richard Roundtree, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., all in the Murder, She Wrote episode “The Last Flight of the Dixie Damsel” (December 18, 1988). Familiar faces in new arrangements: one of the pleasures of television.

See also this cast.

Bye, pseudo-blogger

Like so many blogs, Donald Trump**’s blog is defunct. The Washington Post reports that mockery and a small readership are the reasons for the shutdown. Sheesh, if Trump** was bothered by the idea of a small readership, he shouldn’t have started a blog.

[Pseudo, because it’s unlikely that he wrote much of it himself.]

For those who fuss over spacing

I had hoped that the non-breaking thin space would change everything.

Here’s an italicized word in parentheses: (test).

Ugly, no?

Here’s the same text with the addition of a thin space —   — before the closing parenthesis: (test ).

Better, yes?

But the thin space functions like an ordinary space. With the insertion of a thin space, characters that should stay together can end up split across two lines, like so: (test 
).

That’s a faked example. But it does happen. You can guess how I know that.

Enter the non-breaking thin space —   or  . It’s slightly wider than a thin space, and it’s supposed to be, as its name suggests, unbreakable. But it breaks. You can guess how I know that too. Here’s what I saw as a Preview while working on an earlier post:

[That’s what I get for making a silly plural.]

I think that   and   are interchangeable, but I could be wrong. What I know is that they both break in Safari. So I’m still looking for a non-breaking thin space that does not break. And I’d like to know why the allegedly non-breaking thin space displays differently in macOS and iOS. On iOS devices, it’s indistinguishable from no-space.

[For collectors only: the ordinary non-breaking space is  . And if anyone wants to asks, “Who cares?” — I do.]

Blue canard

From an Open Culture post about Robert Johnson and Keith Richards:

Figuring out what Johnson did still consumes his biggest fans. Since his recordings were intentionally sped up, interpreters of his music must make their best guesses about his tunings.

No, there’s no evidence that Robert Johnson’s recordings were intentionally speeded up. I left a comment on the Open Culture post saying just that, with links to relevant commentary by Elijah Wald and me. That was early yesterday morning. My comment hasn’t yet appeared, and I’m guessing that it won’t be appearing.

It’s crazy-making to me that what began as a “theory” about Johnson’s recordings seems to be acquiring the status of a fact. But it’s only a blue canard.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Johnson posts (Pinboard)

[I opt for speeded up. Garner’s Modern English Usage: “The best past tense and past-participial form is sped, not *speeded. It has been so since the 17th century. But there’s one exception: the phrasal verb speed up (= to accelerate) <she speeded up to 80 m.p.h.>”]

Domestic comedy

“It’s a ‘known fact,’ as you would say.”

“Don’t turn my words against me!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Nobody and Somebody

Ginevra Fanshawe, Miss Thing herself, wants to know, “Who are you, Miss Snowe?”


And a little later:

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

A rising character indeed. Lucy Snowe is a protagonist in a novel.

I would like to imagine that these passages from Villette stand behind Emily Dickinson’s 260 (1862):

260, from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).

Noting that Dickinson read “competitively,” seeking to outdo other poets, Richard B. Sewall points to a different inspiration for 260: “Little Nobody,” a trite poem by Charles Mackay that appeared in the Springfield Republican (1858). The closing lines of its two stanzas: “I’m but little Nobody — Nobody am I,” “Who would be a Somebody? — Nobody am I.” Okay. But I’d rather think of Dickinson finding inspiration in Brontë’s protagonist, whose life of aloneness, walking by herself in empty classrooms, stealing away to an attic to read a letter, must have made compelling reading for the poet.

There were two copies of Villette in the Dickinson family library: one from 1853, one from 1859. In neither are the passages I’ve quoted marked. Then again, in all of Jane Eyre there are just two passages that Dickinson marked.

”Who are you, Miss Dickinson?”

“I am a rising character — Vesuvius at home.”

Related reading
All OCA Brontë posts and Dickinson posts (Pinboard)

[Miss Fanshawe doesn’t speak the word “somebody”: the contrast between “nobody” and “somebody” is Lucy’s. Sewall writes about Mackay’s poem in The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974). Sewall doesn’t mention Villette in relation to 260. “Vesuvius at home”: from Dickinson’s 1691, which ends, “A Crater I may contemplate / Vesuvius at home.” The phrase became the title of Adrienne Rich’s 1976 essay “Vesuvius at Home.”]

Some of the old songs, Sam

That Applebee’s commercials rely on the theme songs from Cheers and Welcome Back, Kotter to encourage a return to in-person eating tells you something about the chain’s target audience. Cheers signed off twenty-eight years ago; Welcome Back, Kotter, forty-two years ago.

[Let the record show: Elaine and I have been to an Applebee’s just once. We did not laugh; we were not needed; and no one knew our names.]

Paving-stones

Back at Madame Beck’s school after a concert.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

This passage seems to presage one in Marcel Proust’s Finding Time Again (1927). As Proust’s narrator enters the Guermantes’ Paris courtyard, its uneven paving stones bring back the past: “And almost at once I realized that it was Venice,” and the narrator experiences the sensation he felt “on the two uneven flagstones in the baptistery of St. Mark’s.” There’s nothing like an exact resemblance here: Lucy Snowe is back at the scene of a crucial moment in her life; remembering it, she notices a detail she noticed then. For Proust’s narrator, one discrete moment brings back another without conscious effort. Still, paving-stones.

A colorful detail about one of the hired men in the male brothel in this volume of Proust’s novel: he was involved in the murder of a concierge at La Villette. La Villette is a Paris park.

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

[Translation by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).]

Memorial Day

[“Gloucester, Massachusetts. Memorial Day, 1943. A Legionnaire sounding taps for the War dead during services.” Photograph by Gordon Parks. From the Library of Congress. Click for a much larger view.]

“The radiant present”

Off to a concert. Lucy Snowe begins to see more of the city of Villette, capital of the fictional French-speaking kingdom of Labassecour.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)