Urban density

[C. 58 East 14th Street, New York, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I went browsing in the Village and found this lovely moment of urban density. I tried counting the words: close to ninety, I think. This stretch of East 14th Street is now — what else? — a Duane Reade. Three words. Duane. Reade. Pharmacy.

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

9/11

Twenty-one years after the fact, and I can’t see a cloudless sky without thinking of September 11, 2001. I remember that day and those that followed as having intensely blue and cloudless skies.

Marsha Hunt (1917–2022)

She had a fine comic turn as Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1940). But our household knows her better as a familiar face in film noir. The New York Times has an obituary.

The documentary Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity (dir. Roger C. Memos, 2015) is worth seeking out. I suspect TCM will air it again soon.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell. I’d say it’s half as tough as his last Stumper — for me, that meant fifteen minutes instead of thirty.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, six letters, “One making service calls.” I thought of plumbers and tennis umpires.

1-D, four letters, “Key missing ON & O.” Kinda obvious, but deeply defamiliarizing, at least for me. When I see key, my first thought is music.

26-D, ten letters, “Alchemist’s ‘little person’ statue.” I can’t recall when I last saw this answer. Long, long ago.

36-D, nine letters, “Highly hoppy refreshment.” I have enjoyed hoppy refreshment, but I had no idea there is such a thing. It seems to me to be a marketing gimmick.

40-A, eight letters, “Ultra-extreme.” Nicely colloquial, though it makes me think of political nutjobs.

41-A, six letters, “What you must provide for a kid’s cable car kit.” I got the answer and thought What?  It turns out that you can make a cable car from a kit. But I think you’d be providing something else, even if 41-A is in the name of said kit.

52-D, “Body language?” A bit of a stretch. More than a bit. A great big stretch in the interest of Stumpery.

58-D, three letters, “Audible crack.” Ha.

My favorite clues in this puzzle, both exceptionally clever:

12-D, ten letters, “One in a recital trio.”

28-A, four letters, “What may precede a Q & A.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Food for thought

Media priorities: ABC, CBS, and NBC are covering King Charles speech live today; none of them carried President Biden’s primetime address on threats to our democracy.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) September 9, 2022

日本の電報

“Old friends send them for funerals. Politicians deliver them to constituents. And businesses use them to commemorate the retirement of valued employees”: telegrams in Japan (The New York Times).

Other telegram posts
DOWDY WORLD MOURNS END OF ERA STOP : The Retro-Gram : URGENT EXCLAMATION POINT : What is a straight wire?

[日本の電報: Nihon no denpō, Japanese telegrams, or telegrams in Japan. Via Google Translate, but it appears to be correct.]

In search of Anna K.

I wrote this morning that I would someday write a post about the difficulty of searching Amazon for the Modern Library paperback edition of Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova, or for any particular legitmate edition of a work in the public domain. Today is the day. And these results, which may change at any time, are as of today:

Search in the Books category for anna karenina modern library and the first result is the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation, from Penguin. That’s followed by a used copy of the Modern Library unrevised Garnett translation, a used copy of the Kent–Berberova revision (listed as being from 1950, fifteen years before their revised translation was published, a Kindle version of the Garnett translation (“the international bestseller”) selling for 19¢, the Rosemary Edmonds translation, another used copy of Garnett, Harold Bloom’s The Bright Book of Life, the Joel Carmichael translation, and so on. If you change your mind about what to read, there’s also a listing for War and Peace, translated by Louise Maude.

If you search for anna karenina kent berberova, in a sly attempt to exclude the unrevised Garnett translation, you get a used Modern Library hardcover of the Kent–Berberova revision (no price), followed by Pevear and Volokhonsky, Carmichael, a used copy of the Kent–Berberova revision (“1950”), the 19¢ special, and a series of eight CDs, $19 each, translator and reader unidentified.

Try anna karenina kent berberova modern library or anna karenina garnett kent berberova modern library, and the results are much the same.

I began to wonder this morning: how did I ever find the book at Amazon? Via ISBN? No — that number returns, weirdly enough, Pevear and Volokhonsky, the 19¢ special, and so on. Could it be that searches for one edition of Anna Karenina are redirecting me to what Amazon would like me to buy instead? I think it could.

The way I found what I wanted today: anna karenina modern library paperback, and there it was, at the top of the list. So it appears that, at least with this search, paperback is the key word. Though searching for anna karenina modern library paperback also returned listings for Fahrenheit 451 and a Kingsley Amis murder mystery.

Searching Amazon for a work in the public domain is a tricky proposition. It’s much safer searching at a bookstore, though I’m not sure where I’d find a bookstore with two copies of anna karenina garnett kent berberova modern library on hand.

“The turning point of summer”

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

The Four Seasons Reading Club (Elaine, me) is taking on another long book.

[Someday I will have to write a post about the difficulty of searching Amazon for this edition, or for any particular legitmate edition of a work in the public domain.]

The Queen’s Suite

Duke Ellington, in Music Is My Mistress (1973):

In 1958, I was invited to perform at the first festival of the arts in Leeds, England, where I had the great honor of being presented to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. Representatives of all the arts were drawn from all over the world, and at the festival’s conclusion a magnificent banquet was preceded by a red-carpet reception. Her Majesty asked me when I first visited England. “Nineteen thirty-three, Your Majesty, years before you were born.”

Inspired by this meeting, I composed and recorded The Queen’s Suite.

Ellington and Billy Strayhorn set to work on the suite shortly after this meeting. The story goes that one copy of the 1959 recording was pressed and sent to Her Majesty. We now know that other copies circulated among select listeners. The common listener was finally able to hear the suite on the Pablo LP The Ellington Suites (1976).

The Queen’s Suite is in six parts, four of them by Ellington and Strayhorn. The second and fourth parts are by Strayhorn alone:

Sunset and the Mocking Bird : Lightning Bugs and Frogs : Le Sucrier Velours : Northern Lights : The Single Petal of a Rose : Apes and Peacocks

The musicians: Duke Ellington, piano; Harry Carney, Paul Gonsalves, Jimmy Hamilton, Johnny Hodges, Russell Procope, reeds; Cat Anderson, Harold “Shorty” Baker, Ray Nance, Clark Terry, trumpets; Quentin Jackson, John Sanders, Britt Woodman, trombones; Jimmy Woode, bass; Jimmy Johnson, drums.

The Queen’s Suite is Ellington–Strayhorn music of an especially high order. If you’ve never heard it, give it a try.

[Queen Elizabeth apparently had some feeling for jazz.]

Reality-distortion fields

I like this sentence so much that I’m borrowing it from this movie-compilation post to highlight here:

The difference between Steve Jobs’s reality-distortion field and Elizabeth Holmes’s: Jobs made people believe they could do hard things; Holmes made people believe she was doing hard things.

Every good teacher has, I believe, a working reality-distortion field — of the Jobs variety. In other words: you, student, may think you “can’t write.” But guess what: you can get better.

A related post
Reality-distortion fields

[Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) is awaiting sentencing for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. And guess what: she just asked for a new trial.]