NBC, sheesh

In quotation marks, large letters filling the screen on NBC Nightly News:

“radar anomoly”

*

February 13: I went to get a screenshot and found that it’s been corrected, in a different font.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

The Harlem Branch Y

From Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B,” from the book-length sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). The writer (not “speaker”) has been given an assignment: write a page, “And let that page come out of you — / Then, it will be true.” He wonders if it’s that simple:


Here’s the poem. Imagine being an instructor and getting that page in response to an assignment.

The college is the City College of New York at 160 Convent Avenue. The park is St. Nicholas Park. Eighth Avenue is now Frederick Douglass Boulevard; Seventh, now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. And here is the Y:

[Harlem Branch YMCA, 180 West 135th Street, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The Y still stands. When I taught this poem, I liked to use Google Maps to follow the poem’s path (though one can’t get across the park by map). And I liked to play samples to give a sense of the writer’s eclectic musical interests: “Bessie, bop, or Bach,” his own three Bs. I didn’t know about the tax photos in the NYC Municipal Archives then.

Here’s some Harlem Branch Y history, with Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Jackie Robinson, Cicely Tyson, and Wesley A. Williams.

*

It occurred to me only today that Hughes‘s poem fits perfectly on one typed page.

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is a tough one. That is, a good one. I got my start in the southwest, where 42-D, five letters, “Part of many racetrack names” and 48-D, four letters, “Merger partner of Mayer” cracked things open. The northeast was a struggle, for reasons that will become apparent.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, five letters, “One announcing an interjection.” AHEMER doesn’t fit.

4-D, nine letters, “About two dozen nanometers.” I’ll believe it when I see it.

8-D, three letters, “Certain course, for short.” An arbitrary way to clue a bit of crosswordese. My first thought was APP.

10-D, five letters, “Railway pricing adjective.” From the northeast. It’s a word? It’s a word.

15-A, nine letters, “Short podcasts.” From the northeast. I listen to many podcasts, long and short, but I have never heard or read this word.

19-A, seven letters, “Her first film (1981) was director George Cukor’s last.” A slightly startling factoid. Cukor began directing in 1930.

27-A, four letters, “Starter home?” Clever clueing.

33-A, nine letters, “Think too much of.” I was trying to come up with a synonym for hero worship.

35-A, fifteen letters, “Protégé’s request.” I don’t think so. The answer is a venerable bit of speech, but protégé doesn’t fit.

49-A, seven letters, “Unsurprising conclusions of whodunits.” A surprising clue.

My least favorite in this puzzle is from the northeast: 11-D, four letters, “Seattle school, familiarly.” Familiarly for whom? Pretty ridic, I say.

My favorite: 16-D, fourteen letters, “Getaways that go without saying.” I took “without saying” the wrong way, which deepens my admiration for the clueing.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A Caedmon drawing and anecdote

The New York Times has an obituary for Marianne Mantell, co-founder of Caedmon Records. It prompted me to pull down my copy of The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading Their Own Poetry, a 1956 2-LP set that I long ago acquired as a library discard. A carboard insert with the track listing features this whimsical drawing, artist unidentified:

[Click for a larger view.]

I trust that the inspiration is obvious, but if not.

*

From Ron Padgett’s Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (1993):

We listened to records such as The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets. When Stevens read the first line of “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in that slow, stately, grave voice — “She sang beyond the genius of the sea” — Ted’s mouth would form a little O and his eyebrows would rise as he turned to shoot me a look, as if to say, “Get that!” And every time Richard Eberhart, reading “The Groundhog,” came to the dead groundhog and said, in that delicate little voice of his, “I poked him with an angry stick,” we exploded with laughter. “An angry stick! Yikes!”

Cubist pencil

[The American Stationer, May 9, 1914. Click for a larger view.]

“Round, having a novel finish of small squares in assorted colors,” says the advertisement. “Most effective in appearance.” You can see the pencil in color at Brand Name Pencils. It’s a wow.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Bacharach interpreters

An impromptu list, tilting toward jazz:

Erroll Garner, “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” with Bob Cranshaw, bass; Grady Tate, drums; José Mangual, congas.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk, “I Say a Little Prayer,” with Ron Burton, piano; Vernon Martin, bass; Jimmy Hopps, drums; Joe Texidor, tambourine.

Kirk again, “You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart),” with Ron Burton; piano; Henry Mattathias Pearson: bass; Robert Shy: drums; Joe Texidor, tambourine.

And if you want songs as songs, with words by Hal David, here’s a medley by Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick.

And another, from the Carpenters.

And there’s this song, by Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager.

“Burt Bacharach, Whose Buoyant Pop Confections Lifted the ’60s, Dies at 94” (The New York Times)

[I wish that the obituary had more to say about the music as music, and perhaps a bit less to say about “a sleek era of airy romance” and the evocation of “an upscale world of jet travel, sports cars and sleek bachelor pads.”]

The midwestern sublime

I’m not thinking of beauty. From the Oxford English Dictionary:

The sublime is an important concept in 18th- and 19th-cent. aesthetics, closely linked to the Romantic movement. It is often (following Burke’s theory of aesthetic categories) contrasted with the beautiful and the picturesque, in the fact that the emotion it evokes in the beholder encompasses an element of terror.

I first thought of the midwestern sublime when driving in the late afternoon, in late fall or early winter. It must have been more thirty years ago. We were driving home on a rural route after a day of shopping in a nearby city. Elaine was reading the liner notes of Yazoo Records’ Skip James LP (a purchase of the day) to entertain me as we drove. And it occurred to me that the sound of James’s voice matched the landscape around us, even if we were in Illinois and not Mississippi.

The midwestern sublime is composed of equal parts vast muddy fields and vast grey skies, as seen from a car on a two-lane rural route. There are telephone poles along one side of the road and houses on the other. The houses are infrequent and unlit, their mailboxes and newspaper boxes waiting — for what? There are no other vehicles on the road. The sky is beginning to darken.

Have I made myself bleak?

[Skip James sang about our state in “Illinois Blues”: “If you go to Banglin’, tell my boys / What a time I‘m having, up in Illinois.” A good time, he says. Banglin’: a Mississippi lumber camp.]

Errand, errant

I wondered: could errand and errant be related? Isn’t a knight errant, roving about, kinda like on an errand sort of, maybe?

Etymonline on errand :

Old English ærende “message, mission; answer, news, tidings,” from Proto-Germanic *airundija- “message, errand” (source also of Old Saxon arundi, Old Norse erendi, Danish ærinde, Swedish ärende, Old Frisian erende, Old High German arunti “message”), which is of uncertain origin. Compare Old English ar “messenger, servant, herald.” Originally of important missions; meaning “short, simple journey and task” is attested by 1640s. Related: Errands. In Old English, ærendgast was “angel,” ærendraca was “ambassador.”

And on errant :

mid-14c., “traveling, roving,” from Anglo-French erraunt, from two Old French words that were confused even before they reached English: 1. Old French errant, present participle of errer “to travel or wander,” from Late Latin iterare, from Latin iter “journey, way,” from root of ire “to go” (from PIE root *ei- “to go”); 2. Old French errant, past participle of errer (see err ). The senses fused in English 14c., but much of the sense of the latter since has gone with arrant.

So, no.

I sometimes guess correctly about etymologies. See doff and don. But not often.

Related reading
All OCA etymology posts (Pinboard)

Rebecca Black’s Thursday

This morning I learned from NPR that Rebecca Black has an album coming out today. Thanks, NPR.

In 2011, as a moderator for the East-Central Illinois Cultural Studies Association Conference’s Music-as-Culture Division’s Pop Music section, I issued an call for papers on Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” I enjoyed rereading the titles of the submissions this Thursday. My favorite: “Notes Toward a Supreme Weekend: The Suburban Sublime in ‘Friday.’”

[The E-CICSAC was, of course, imaginary.]

Ronald Blythe (1922–2022)

Author of Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village. The New York Times has an obituary.

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Eight excerpts from Akenfield