Words from Ralph Ellison

Words from Ralph Ellison that I’ve long carried in my head started knocking around in there yesterday, so I added them to the Words to Live By in the sidebar.

If you’re reading via RSS, click through and you can see them, along with words from Heraclitus, Harvey Pekar, Marcel Proust, Eleanor Roosevelt, J.D. Salinger, and Simone Weil.

How to do a left-branching sentence

It’s by Olivia Nuzzi, writing in New York:

Donald Trump was impeached twice, lost the 2020 election by 7,052,770 votes, is entangled in investigations by federal prosecutors (over the Capitol insurrection and over the mishandling of classified White House documents and over election interference) and the District of Columbia attorney general (over financial fraud at the Presidential Inaugural Committee) and the Manhattan district attorney (over financial fraud at the Trump Organization) and the New York State attorney general (over financial fraud at the Trump Organization) and the Westchester County district attorney (over financial fraud at the Trump Organization) and the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney (over criminal election interference in Georgia) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (over rules violations in plans to take his social-media company public through a SPAC) and the House Select Committee on January 6 (whose hearings are the runaway TV-ratings hit of the summer), yet on Monday, July 11, he was in a fantastic mood.

Virginia Tufte, in Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2006):

In many successful left–branching sentences, there is a temporal or logical development of the expressed idea that invites the delayed disclosure of the left-branching arrangement. The material that comes first seems natural and appropriate, and the anticipated material that concludes the sentence makes an almost inevitable point.

It’s the opposite here: the point is not inevitable but surprising, aberrant, and the sentence is all the stronger for it. The repetition of “(over financial fraud at the Trump Organization)” is especially effective in piling up all the points that will be contradicted by “yet” when the sentence comes to its close.

[Garner’s Modern English Usage defines left-branching sentence: “A complicated sentence that has most of its complexity — the conditions, exceptions, etc. — before the principal verb; one that has a majority of its constituents on the left side of the tree diagram.” I’ve omitted the links in Nuzzi’s sentence. You can find them in the original.]

Menthol trickery

Here’s a deeply researched and deeply disturbing book: Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), by Princeton historian Keith Wailoo. Wailoo begins with Dave Chappelle’s question: “Why do black people love menthols so much?” The joke answer, of course: “Nobody knows.” But tobacco companies and advertising consultants know.

An excerpt:

As I looked closely into the industry’s menthol project, I came to understand that menthol’s history is layered with trickery that takes one’s breath away — both figuratively and literally. I also came to see menthol’s ascent as exemplary of the broader story of racial capitalism in America. That is, it is a story of race and the economy of cities, of the racial profits to be made in the smoking business, and about the devices created for extracting wealth from Black communities even as they also extracted health from Black bodies. The business tactics that helped companies develop Black menthol markets were not specific to African Americans. Yet the industry’s commitment to understanding the African American social condition (in order to shape smoking preferences) is at once fascinating and frightening. If their studies of Black life had been done for any other purposes than for the selling of tobacco products, the depth of thought devoted to understanding race, the city, and society might be admirable. They studied the difficulties that Black people in cities confronted. They looked closely at the challenges of poverty, drug use, residential segregation, and urban decline — doing so to a remarkable degree. Big Tobacco’s interest in these issues was not focused on ameliorating social ills, however. Their brand of racial capitalism looked at urban distress and social vulnerability in search of opportunity. With greater social adversity came the capacity for greater profits.

Three details to illustrate the shamelessness of the effort to sell menthol to Black communities:

~ In 1971 advertising consultants suggested to Liggett a new menthol brand to appeal to Black people in the “drug culture.” It was to be called Halfway, which the consultants said was meant to suggest “a half-way house toward marijuana and heroin.”

~ In 1976 a Lorillard executive floated the name Cole for a new menthol brand, meant to suggest Nat King Cole: “I believe the name COLE (if not already registered) would be immediately accepted by the Blacks.” The executive seems not to have known that Cole smoked three packs a day and died of lung cancer.

~ And in 1990 R.J. Reynolds was forced to scrap plans for the menthol brand Uptown.

In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, Wailoo offered a short version of the book’s argument: “How the Tobacco Industry Hooked Black Smokers on Menthols.”

Our tube

Herb Edelman, Margot Kidder, Cynthia Nixon, and David Soul, all in the Murder, She Wrote episode “Threshold of Fear” (February 28, 1993). Familiar faces in new arrangements: one of the pleasures of television. See also these arrangments.

[Edelman: Stanley Zbornak in The Golden Girls. The other names should be recognizable. When I watch Murder, She Wrote, I watch just long enough to see the familiar cast members on the screen.]

Humble crow

A guest on the PBS NewsHour just now: “That’s why I’m eating humble crow this afternoon.”

All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

[A quick look around suggests to me that this mixing of idioms is not unusual. But it’s new to me.]

“Smart girls writing something”

It’s lunchtime in the “Lestrygonians” episode, whose narrative technique is peristalsis. Thus five men advertising a Dublin printer and stationer circulate through the streets. How can I not post a passage about stationery supplies and a Bloom scheme to sell them?

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

A few glosses:

~ Bloom was once employed as a traveling salesman for Charles Wisdom Hely, (1856–1929), Dublin printer and stationer.

~ The letters on the hats remind Bloom of something he noticed when he stopped into a church earlier in the day: IHS, the letters on the back of the priest’s vestments. Bloom thinks they mean “I have suffered.” Not so. In two other appearances, the final hat has an apostrophe: ’S.

~ Skilly: skilligalee, a thin broth or porridge.

~ Boyl: Blazes Boylan, businessman of many endeavors and the sometime manager of Molly Bloom’s singing career. In the Odyssey scheme of things, he is “the suitors” to Molly’s Penelope. Bloom’s dread of what will happen/has happened during Boylan’s afternoon visit to Molly runs through the hours of the day.

~ M’Glade: not mentioned elsewhere in the novel.

~ Bloom’s penchant for unusual ideas is well on display in this passage. His idea of a transparent showcart is far more inventive and amusing than the placing of an ad for Plumtree’s Potted Meat under the obituaries.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

A waitress speaks

The diner scene in Five Easy Pieces made me think of Dolores Dante, from Studs Terkel’s Working (New York: Pantheon, 1974):

I have to be a waitress. How else can I learn about people? How else does the world come to me? I can’t go to everyone. So they have to come to me. Everyone wants to eat, everyone has hunger. And I serve them. If they’ve had a bad day, I nurse them, cajole them. Maybe with coffee I give them a little philosophy. They have cocktails, I give them political science.

I’ll say things that bug me. If they manufacture soap, I say what I think about pollution. If it’s automobiles, I say what I think about them. If I pour water I’ll say, “Would you like your quota of mercury today?” If I serve cream, I say, “Here is your substitute. I think you’re drinking plastic.” I just can’t keep quiet. I have an opinion on every single subject there is. In the beginning it was theology, and my bosses didn’t like it. Now I am a political and my bosses don’t like it. I speak sotto voce. But if I get heated, then I don’t give a damn. I speak like an Italian speaks. I can’t be servile. I give service. There is a difference.

*

People imagine a waitress couldn’t possibly think or have any kind of aspiration other than to serve food. When somebody says to me, “You’re great, how come you’re just a waitress? Just a waitress. I’d say “Why, don’t you think you deserve to be served by me?”

So many memorable voices in that book. Sharon Atkins, receptionist: “I never answer the phone at home.” Brett Hauser, supermarket box boy: “In the general scheme of things, in the large questions of the universe, putting a can of dog food in the bag wrong is not of great consequence.” Lincoln James, maintenance man in a rendering and glue factory: “It’s not a stink, but it’s not sweet either.” Joe Zmuda, retired: “That daydreaming don’t do you any good.”

[The Social Security Death Index lists one Dolores Dante, 1929–1979. “Dolores Dante” was a pseudonym.]

Turning the tables

Representative Jamie Raskin (D, MD-8) in his closing remarks at today’s January 6 hearing, taking up theme of Donald Trump’s inauguration:

“In his inaugural address, Trump introduced one commanding image: ‘American carnage.’ Although that turn of phrase explained little about our country before he took office, it turned out to be an excellent prophecy of what his rage would come to visit on our people.”

And:

“American carnage: that’s Donald Trump’s true legacy. His desire to overthrow the people’s election and seize the presidency, interrupt the counting of Electoral College votes for the first time in American history, nearly toppled the constitutional order and brutalized hundreds and hundreds of people.”

And:

“Constitutional democracy is the silver frame, as Lincoln put it, upon which the golden apple of freedom rests. We need to defend both our democracy and our fredom with everything we have and declare that this American carnage ends here and now. In a world of resurgent authoritarianism and racism and anti-Semitism, let’s all hang tough for American democracy.”

I think Rasking might have done well to omit “Although that turn of phrase explained little about our country before he took office.” Because in truth, there’s been plenty of American carnage at home and abroad. But I can see the point of turning the tables as Raskin did.

And in the spirit of Steve Jobs’s “one more thing” moments, the hearing ended with a bombshell from Liz Cheney (R, WY), who revealed that after the last hearing, Trump tried to call a witness not yet seen in the hearings. That person declined the call and alerted their lawyer, who alerted the committee. And the committee has reported the matter to the Department of Justice. Is it witness tampering yet? With Mark Meadows?

Merrick Garland, cleanup in aisle 45!

[My transcription.]

UNHINGED

“The west wing is UNHINGED”: Cassidy Hutchinson, in a text message sent during the December 18 meeting between Trump, White House aides, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell. Trump’s “will be wild” tweet followed.

A Blackwing sighting

[From Death in Small Doses (dir. Joseph M. Newman, 1957). Click for a much larger view.]

Peter Graves is an undercover agent posing as a truck driver; Merry Anders is a waitress. The Blackwing is a pencil. Click and look at the ferrule: that’s an Eberhard Faber Blackwing for sure.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing posts (Pinboard)