Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. I got off to a fast start: 13-A, six letters, “Director whose parents were a screenplay team”; 11-D, five letters, “Mighty Dump Truck maker”; and 19-A, three letters, “Sanctions.” But I soon realized that this puzzle would be a killer: my solving experience was a matter of blank stares and occasional exclamations. 8-D, eight letters, “Literary justification”? Ah! It took me thirty-one minutes to solve this puzzle, which I was pretty sure I wouldn’t solve.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, six letters, “#3 name on the most #1 albums list.” The name surprised me.

1-D, nine letters, “SOS, for instance.” I don’t think I’ve seen the answer in a puzzle before.

4-D, five letters, “‘Double Fudge’ creator.” Here’s an example of how the use of quotation marks for italics (which I’ve added elsewhere) can complicate things. I thought the answer had to concern OREOS.

15-D, seven letters, “Hummers in summer.” Ah!

20-A, six letters, “Kennedy Center singer/songwriter honoree with Seiji and Cicely.” Two days ago I watched a performance from that year’s Kennedy Center Honors. That gave me the answer.

21-A, eight letters, “They’re seen on many fall-issued stamps.” Strangely misdirective.

21-D, seven letters, “#1 in African tourist arrivals.” See 31-A.

27-D, nine letters, “Term first used for a legendary Italian.” Huh. Post-solving, I looked it up.

31-A, seven letters, “Sunday Morning correspondent.” See 21-D.

40-D, five letters, “McGarrett’s mom on Hawaii Five-0.” Wha?

46-A, three letters, “Downer of a noun/verb/
adverb/interjection.” I learned something.

49-A, seven letters, “Ring with silver, say.” Defamiliarizing.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Block that metaphor

My friend Stefan Hagemann alerted me to these sentences in The New York Times:

“I think the governor is more popular than Disney — I think the governor is more popular than the former president,” said Anthony Pedicini, a Republican strategist in Tampa. “If you’re running for office as a Republican in Florida and you aren’t toeing the DeSantis mantra, you will not win.”

Garner’s Modern English Usage gives this explanation of toe the line and toe the mark:

These phrases — meaning “to conform to the rules; to do one’s duty” — derive from track-and-field events in which the contestants were once told to put one foot on the starting line. (Now the shouted instruction is On your marks! )

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms gives the same explanation.

Both Stefan and I wondered if the strategist might have said towing — in other words, carrying — which might make more sense. But with Ron DeSantis, there should be no expectation that anything should make sense. At any rate, you can’t toe a mantra, although you can say one, repeatedly, until the cows, or some other metaphors, come home.

Thanks, Stefan.

Related reading
All OCA posts (Pinboard)

Who was Jack the Bear?

Re: Duke Ellington’s “Jack the Bear”: where did that title come from?

John S. Wright identifies Jack the Bear as a name in a ritualized Black American exchange of greetings of the 1930s and ’40s: “How are you?” “Like Jack-the-Bear: just ain’t nowhere.” “Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation,” says the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Mark Tucker writes that “the real Jack the Bear was a Harlem bass player who, as reed-player Garvin Bushell recently [c. 1986] recalled, had a tailor shop at the corner of St. Nicholas and Edgecombe Avenues.” Jack the Bear has also been identified as a pianist. Perhaps he played both instruments.

The tax photographs in the NYC Municipal Archives Collections show no tailor shop at the corner of Saint Nicholas and Edgecombe, but one block over, at the corner of Edgecombe and 141st Street, a tailor was at work:

[131 Edgecombe Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

If you squint a bit, you can make out the TAILORS signage.


Steven C. Tracy identifies the musician, bassist or pianist, as one John Wilson. Tracy doesn’t identify him as a tailor. The 1940 Manhattan telephone directory lists a John W. Wilson residing at 281 Edgecombe. Ellington lived for many years at 381 Edgecombe.

Was John W. Wilson the tailor at 131 Edgecombe? Was that tailor Jack the Bear? Did Ellington ever make use of his services? I’ll never know.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

Sources
Stephen C. Tracy, “A Delicate Ear, a Retentive Memory, and the Power to Weld the Fragments,” in A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison, ed. Tracy (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Mark Tucker, liner notes to Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band (RCA, 1986).

John S. Wright, “The Conscious Hero and the Rites of Man: Ellison’s War,” in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: A Casebook, ed. John F. Callahan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on April 29, 1899.

I bought my first Ellington record in 1973 or ’74: This One’s for Blanton, piano-bass duets with Ray Brown. I bought my second Ellington record not long after: At His Very Best, an RCA compilation. The great 1940 recording “Jack the Bear” — side one, track one — was my introduction to the Ellington band.

Here is the best version of that recording that I can find on YouTube (it’s unembeddable). The players: Duke Ellington, piano, composition; Wallace Jones, Cootie Williams, trumpets; Rex Stewart, cornet; Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, Lawrence Brown, trombones; Juan Tizol, valve trombone; Barney Bigard, Otto Hardwick, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Harry Carney, reeds; Fred Guy, guitar; Jimmy Blanton, bass; Sonny Greer, drums. Recorded in Chicago, March 6, 1940. The arrangment is by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. The soloists are Blanton, Ellington, Bigard, Williams, Bigard, Carney, Nanton, Blanton.

I’ll invoke Emerson: “perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.” “Jack the Bear” will never be out of date.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

Slipshod logic

“This would not be the first time in the pandemic that unwarranted assumptions about human behavior have obstructed an effective response to Covid”: in The New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci writes about the slipshod logic behind delays in authorizing vaccines for children and other instances of slipshod logic in the management of COVID-19.

Dictation failure

[Dictating a text.]

“I just mowed the whole lawn”

I just move the whole lawn

“Mowed exclamation point mowed exclamation point”

Mode! Mode!

Other dictation failures
Boogie-woogie : A concluding truck for belated pubs : Derrida : Edifice and Courson Blatz : Wrath scholar

Not lonely, not a bird

Derek Warren, twenty-nine, ploughman:

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969).

Also from Akenfield
Davie’s hand : Rubbish : “Just ‘music’” : “Caught in the old ways” : “The blue rode well in the corn” : “I began in a world without time”

“I began in a world without time”

Horry Rose, sixty-one, saddler:

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969).

Also from Akenfield
Davie’s hand : Rubbish : “Just ‘music’” : “Caught in the old ways” : “The blue rode well in the corn”

Days

Betty Horak (Beverly Michaels) is being sarcastic. From Pickup (dir. Hugo Haas, 1951):

“Oh boy, another one of those exciting days.”

I’d counter with words from the OCA sidebar, from Harvey Pekar’s story “Alice Quinn”:

Every day is a new deal.

Salinger in Ohio

[Click either image for bigger news.]

I never thought I’d see more than one of these headlines. They’re real, and may be found here and here, at least until there’s a correction. But I don’t think a correction is coming.

QAnon fans take note: J.D. Salinger, too, is alive.

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)