“Always meeting ourselves”

Stephen Dedalus speaks. From the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Stephen’s words click with a Bloom thought earlier in the day: “Wander along all day. Might meet a robber or two. Well, meet him.” “Meet him”: a pun on metempsychosis (“met him pike hoses”), a word Bloom attempts to explain to Molly earlier in the day. There’s another click to come.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

Aloe, hallo

[As seen on a window sill.]

The sun was just right the other day. I drew on the picture, not on the curtain in front of the aloe.

“Always meeting ourselves,” as Stephen Dedalus would say. Faces everywhere.

Sol. Lou. 25¢ a Lesson

Two weeks ago in these pages I was admiring the symmetrical presentation of Kubrick Self Service Stores at 1267 40th Street, Boro Park, Brooklyn. One week ago I was in a reverie about the Thirteenth Avenue Retail Market, one side of which ran down 40th Street, north of Kubrick. Today it’s time to see what once stood at the corner of 13th and 40th, just south of Kubrick.

[3920 13th Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. As seen from 13th Avenue. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

That’s quite a corner, with nearly every available surface used for text. Sol. Fruit & Vegetable Mkt. Lou. Sol・Fruit・Vegetables・Lou. Quality Fruits & Vegetables. But Sol. and Lou. had nothing on the Community Schools of Music, Courses for Beginners & Advanced, Courses for Children & Adults. And in case you missed it: the price of a lesson was 25¢.

I can find nothing online about these establishments. Not a single advertisement: maybe that’s how they kept prices low. (See below). Something produce-related was still happening on this corner in the not distant past, as this 1980s tax photograph shows. As of October 2021 (Google Maps), the corner of 13th and 40th housed a mobile-phone store and a referral service for home health-care.

When I was a kid in Brooklyn in the 1960s, we may have shopped at this market. Or it may have been another market, also exposed to the open air, Burdo Bros. Poor People[’]s Friends, at 13th Avenue and 39th Street. Here’s a photograph by Anthony Catalano from the early 1970s. A 1980s tax photo shows produce still being sold on that corner, under an awning with what appear to be the same words: Burdo Bros. Poor People[’]s Friends. Whichever market we went to, I remember the handwritten (handnumbered?) signs with prices: everything in red and black, mixing thin and super-thick lines. Something like this. As of September 2021 (Google Maps), the corner of 13th and 39th housed a deli and grill.

Further reverie: just down the avenue from Burdo Bros. in Anthony Catalano’s photograph is the storefront for Vinny and Roger, or Vinny and Roger’s, or Vinny & Rogers, the butcher shop where we bought meat and poultry. I remember also the jars of Aunt Millie’s Spaghetti Sauce lined up on a shelf, with the odd silhouette of a woman with her hair in a bun. I knew a kid named Millie in Brooklyn. I knew a kid named Vinny too. He had an teenaged uncle, Uncle Tony, whom he would call for assistance. Ah, Brooklyn.

*

July 18: I made the mistake of searching Brooklyn Newsstand for “community schools of music.” A search for “community school of music” shows the project getting underway between 1926 and 1927, with classified ads selling furniture and soliciting salespeople, followed by a 1927 advertisement offering lessons. Thanks, Brian.

*

July 20: By 1943, it was Sol’s Fruit & Vegetable Market. Still WIndsor 5-3868. Thanks, Brian. And thanks, telephone directory.

*

November 13: As I now know, it was Vinny & Rogers. See also this photograph.

Related reading
All OCA Boro Park posts (Pinboard) : More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Thel’s usage

[The Family Circus, July 17, 2022.]

Thel’s verb choice in today’s strip made me open Garner’s Modern English Usage:

Any may take either a singular or a plural verb. The singular use is fairly rare.

Let’s make Thel sound less rare:

[The Family Circus revised, July 17, 2022.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

The Newsday crossword is still unavailable (at least to me) at the Newsday website, so I found today’s Saturday Stumper here. Today’s puzzle is by “Lester Ruff” (Stan Newman), and 1-D, six letters, “World Chess champion, 1975-85” seemed to portend an easy puzzle indeed. (Why am I using a word like portend early on a Saturday morning?) The one sticky part of the puzzle for me: the northeast corner, where 7-A, eight letters, “Highly attuned to others” and 10-D, five letters, “Takes in" baffled me. But not forever.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, six letters, “Former members of the OfficeMax family.” Perhaps common knowledge, but news to me.

8-D, six letters, “Heretofore.” I had the wrong start.

14-D, eight letters, “Plant regulated by the EPA.” Not anymore?

37-A, fifteen letters, “Sales promotion phrase.” Oh, that kind of, &c.

37-D, eight letters, “Rallying cry of the 2000s.” I have to think it’s still the case.

47-D, six letters, “Escarole alias.” I had no idea. When I was a grad student, esacrole meant “cheaper than lettuce.” The alias has always seemed to me a fancy-pants word.

53-A, five letters, “The origin of civilzation.” Heh.

56-A, four letters, “Chow chow.” I cannot see these words without thinking of Ed Norton.

66-A, eight letters, “Owlet, for instance.” Aww.

My favorite: 24-D, six letters, “Charge you shouldn’t have to pay for.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Gilead

“We are turning into Gilead”: Jonathan Capehart on the PBS NewsHour just now.

Zippy in the Nancy world

[“One Bush, Two Millers, Three Pinheads.” Zippy, July 15, 2022. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s strip finds our hero in new but familiar surroundings.

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy : Nancy and Zippy : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

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.”