Frank O’Hara was kidding

About the claim made in a New Yorker piece that Frank O’Hara typed the poems of Lunch Poems on a store-display typewriter while on his lunch hour: Joe LeSeuer provides some context. The source for the claim is the blurb that O’Hara wrote for the book’s back cover. From Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003):

It turned out that Ferlinghetti had nothing against — perhaps even wanted? — an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek blurb, since he immediately decided to go to press. Incidentally, it is Frank’s facetious reference to his pausing “at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations” that led later commentators to assert that he sometimes wrote his poems on an Olivetti showroom typewriter. The dumbbells — didn’t they know when they were being kidded?

I guess at The New Yorker they don’t know that O’Hara was kidding.

And yes, I’ve e-mailed the magazine.

Related posts
“Distraction-free devices” (Ralph Ellison, Frank O’Hara, and The New Yorker getting its facts wrong)
A review of Joe LeSueur’s Digressions

Distraction-free devices

In The New Yorker, Julian Lucas wonders whether “distraction-free devices” can change the way we write. I’m not sure. But I do think that they allow a writer to think about writing — and not tabs, fonts, margins, and app settings.

In 2005 I hit on my first version of what Paul Ford once called “Amish computing.” I used the Windows app Notepad2 (still available) and a spellcheck script. When I switched to a Mac in 2007, I began using TextWrangler (since superseded by BBEdit) and WriteRoom. I still stand by what I wrote in 2006: Writing is not word processing. And in 2011: I consider a word-processing window a hostile workplace. I consider Blogger’s Compose view and HTML view hostile workplaces as well, but they’re tolerable if I’m writing a short post.

I now do almost all my writing in iA Writer. For anything that’s to be printed (that is, a “document”), I still use Apple’s Pages app to “process” — ugly word — my words. For writing of any length, I still start with pen or pencil and paper.

[Two mistakes in the New Yorker piece: Ralph Ellison didn’t begin his second novel (published as Juneteenth and Three Days Before the Shooting . . .) on a computer. And Frank O’Hara didn’t write the poems of Lunch Poems on a sample Olivetti, not as what Lucas calls “a cute stunt,” nor as anything else. O’Hara’s claim to have written on a store-display typewriter is just a bit of urban pastoralism, part of the “blurp” the poet wrote for the book’s back cover. (You can see the blurp here, in a letter to City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.) If you do take the blurp as factual, well, it also describes the poet on his lunch hour withdrawing to “a darkened ware- or fire-house to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, co-existence and depth.” LOL. Come on, fact checkers.]

The Greek alphabet and us

“Never did anything I learned as a drunken sorority girl prepare me more for the current world climate as learning the Greek alphabet”: from a Washington Post article about the Greek alphabet in our time.

My teaching experience makes me suspect that fraternity and sorority members learn only the capital letters of the Greek alphabet. But I could be wrong.

An odd detail from this article: a scientist who thought the names for COVID-19 variants should have “gravitas” and “familiarity” suggested using names of characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Gods help us.

A gang of six

“How a half-dozen right-wing members of Congress became key foot soldiers in Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election“: just out from The New York Times, “Meadows and the Band of Loyalists: How They Fought to Keep Trump in Power.”

Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan, and Scott Perry (that name is new to me): they’re fascists at work. Expel them from Congress and charge them with sedition.

From the carny world

In The New York Times, Brooks Barnes writes about Nightmare Alley and his life as the child of carnies:

People don’t quite know what to say when I mention my carny past. Some are fascinated, asking if I ever encountered sideshow performers. (Read on.)

Yes, read on.

I’m looking forward to seeing Nightmare Alley. But I doubt that it will outdo the 1947 original. (Elaine thinks that 1947 is our ideal year for movies. We watched thirteen in a row earlier this year.)

Almodóvar in the Times

“To find his American equivalent, you would have to imagine that the director of American Pie went on to make American Beauty and then a film that touches the ugliest aspects of the American Civil War”: from Marcela Valdes’s long profile of Pedro Almodóvar (The New York Times).

Our household is an Almodóvar-friendly zone. We’ve seen eighteen of his films. If I were ever to meet him, I would use the Spanish that remains to me to say “Gracias por sus películas, señor.”

Yikes

Our own Mary Miller ((R, Illinois-15) made the PBS NewsHour tonight. Miller’s brief moment on camera begins at the 1:22 mark in this segment. An unmasked Marjorie Taylor Greene sits behind her.

I wonder who wrote Mary’s lines for her, and what she thinks a “star chamber” is.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts

Domestic comedy

[The shelves were bare.]

“Pepperidge Farm forgot.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Context here and here.]

Frank Cook (1942–2021)

He preceded Adolfo “Fito” de la Parra as the drummer for Canned Heat and later became a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Here is an account of his life.

Frank Cook gets considerable screen time during Canned Heat’s brief but exciting appearance in Monterey Pop (dir. D.A. Pennebaker, 1968). Watch at YouTube.

Related reading
All OCA Canned Heat posts (Pinboard)

Mary Miller, troublemaker

“At the center of it all is freshman Rep. Mary Miller, a member of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus”: she’s hard at work making trouble for her fellow Republicans (CNN).

In office for nearly one year, Miller hasn’t done a damn thing for the people of her district — except make us look like idiots to the world beyond “east-central Illinois.”

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts