Don’t like a library book?

From Take action for libraries, a handy step-by-step guide: “What do I do if I don't like a book at the library?”

Memorial Day

[“Evacuees of Japanese ancestry attending Memorial Day services at Manzanar, California, a War Relocation authority center — Boy Scouts and American Legion members participating in the services appear in the foreground.” 1942. From the Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

It’s an extraordinary image: people participating in the forms of the culture that has consigned them to a concentration camp. It’s the perennial question of what it means to love a country that doesn’t love you back, and that blurs your imprisonment with the delicate word evacuees.

Nine Japanese immigrants went down with the US Maine in 1898. More than 800 Japanese immigrants and nisei served during World War I. An estimated 33,000 Japanese Americans served in World War II; approximately 800 died. More about their service here and here.

A despedida, Marie Elisabeth

[137 Franklin Street, Finn Square, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Are Marie Elisabeth sardines the best? They’re still around, but I’ve never seen them, much less tasted them. The Portuguese Canning Industry Digital Museum has fifty-six package designs for the company’s sardines and anchovies, which suggests, if not “best,” then certainly “ubiquitous.”

The single-story building on the corner was torn down sometime before April 2009. A Google Maps photograph shows slight traces of letters still visible. Since 2011, a “boutique building” (six stories, three apartments) has stood on the corner. A 2012 New York Times article has more about the history of Finn Square.

A despedida, Marie Elisabeth.

Thanks, Brian.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Succession and poetry

From Andrew Epstein’s blog Locus Solus: Succession, Jeremy Strong, and Frank O’Hara.

Also with John Berryman: did you know that the the final episode of each season of Succession takes its title from Berryman’s “Dream Song 29”?

*

Having watched the show’s final episode, I tend to think that the primary purpose of the Berryman quotations is to add yet another layer of literariness to the proceedings — to deepen the veneer, so to speak. As when Mad Men invoked Frank O’Hara’s poem “Mayakovsky,” I think that the Berryman invocations here amount to much of nothing.

[“Much of nothing”: a favorite fambly phrase from the early years.]

George Maharis (1928–2023)

George Maharis, Buz Murdock of Route 66, has died at the age of ninety-four. The Hollywood Reporter has an obituary.

After watching all of Route 66 in 2013, Elaine and I wrote fan letters to George Maharis and Martin Milner. Here’s one of them:

Dear Mr. Maharis,

We spent a good part of April, May, and June watching the complete run of Route 66 on DVD. We’re writing to thank you — fifty years late — for the terrific work you did as Buz Murdock. We greatly enjoyed the series’s writing, camerawork, and, especially, the acting. Among our favorite Buz-centric episodes are “The Mud Nest” and “Even Stones Have Eyes.” We especially like Buz’s insistent optimism and willingness to believe in people, as when he tells the dancer Rosemarie Brown (Elizabeth Seal), “I see a champion.”

It is amazing to see a series that can range from tragedy to comedy, even slapstick, while always making room for fisticuffs, poetry, and progressive jazz. We’re both in our fifties — too young to have paid attention to Route 66 the first time around, but old enough now to realize how great the series was.

All best wishes,

And George Maharis wrote back.

*

The New York Times now has an obituary.

Related reading
All OCA Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg, and it’s ultra-difficult. I made a good start with 33-D, six letters, “Tighten up, perhaps,” whose last letter gave me a good guess for 32-A, thirteen letters, “Sidewalk café patron, perhaps.” The stickiest parts of this puzzle: the northeast and southwest corners. I had to plug in four or five letters to get the southwest corner. Marone!

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, five letters, “Nothing to worry about.” Just pleasingly clever.

4-D, nine letters, “Small sums.” Not a plural you see very often.

6-D, ten letters, “French fashion.” I had the answer, though I’d long forgotten what it means.

28-A, thirteen letters, “High-tech plants.” The first in a stepped stack of thirteen-letter answers. 32-A is the second.

24-A, thirteen letters, “Rigid reminder.” The third in that stack.

24-D, ten letters, “24th century teakettle.” I’m sure that this clue is meant as a giveaway, but I thought it must have to do with ancient China.

30-D, nine letters, “Racing vehicles.” Only mildly misdirective.

43-D, four letters, “Sphere sliced for snacking.” Not an OREO, though that’s one way to eat them.

47-A, seven letters, “Touch technology.” I just like the word.

55-A, five letters, “Literary heavens.” Why do crossword clues so often make the literary or poetic synonymous with archaisms and stilted contractions? EEN, OER, ORB, &c.

Ugliest row of answers in the puzzle: 36-A, three letters, “The Chesapeake, to geologists”; 37-A, four letters, “Botanical branches”; 38-A, three letters, “Union returnee, Jun. 1868.” (That silly “Jun.” — because there has to be an abbreviation.)

My favorite in this puzzle: 18-D, eight letters, “Encouraging words.” In the American grain.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A teaching moment

I sometimes taught Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” (take two) in intro poetry classes. Its imagery, economy of means, and emotional intensity make the song an extraordinary piece of poetry. (Here are the lyrics.)

The singer begins by going to a crossroads and falling to his knees, pleading for God to save him. He then stands and tries to flag a ride. Vehicles go by; he doesn’t move. He notices the sun sinking down and asks someone else to carry a message to his friend-boy Willie Brown: “Lord, that I’m standin’ at the crossroads babe, I believe I’m sinkin’ down.” He’s still standing, but he feels that he’s sinking. Standing at a crossroads, which seems to promise horizontal movement, he, like the sun, is moving downward.

One time after I played Johnson’s recording, a student in the front row said “You should’ve played Cream.” I smiled and asked, “Where do you think they got it?”

Related reading
All OCA Robert Johnson posts (Pinboard)

[A friend-boy is a male friend. The lyrics of Cream’s “Crossroads,” with their Rosedale choruses, seem incoherent by comparison. And yes, in teaching “Cross Road Blues” I took the opportunity to talk about sundown towns. And no, Robert Johnson did not go to a crossroads to sell his soul to the devil.]

Icicles, shrimp, and tamales

From Mack McCormick’s Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey, ed. John Troutman (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2023):

From a pile of old road maps I’d found in a used bookstore, I dug out a Standard Oil map published in 1942. This one conveniently put Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — plus a corner of Tennessee — on the same sheet. It covered everything from Memphis down to New Orleans, and it showed the roads substantially as they were in Johnson’s lifetime. I devised a code for marking the map: a red triangle for a place mentioned in the songs, a black circle for a town that he was said to have frequented, an abbreviated note that would lead me back to the source, and some cryptic symbols indicating my own hunch as to how trustworthy each entry might be.

I started with the primary clues: the places Johnson had sung about. He’d mentioned eleven towns: Chicago, East Monroe, Friars Point, Gulfport, Hot Springs, Memphis, Norfolk, Rosedale, Vicksburg, West Helena, and West Memphis. Three states: Arkansas, California, and Tennessee. Three nations: China, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. And two transportation lines: Greyhound and the “Gulfport Island Road.” In addition, there were three words from which some geographic inferences could be drawn: icicles, shrimp, and tamales.

It wasn’t a long list, only twenty-two items in all.

This passage gives some sense of the book, which is, in truth, not a biography but an account of the writer’s detective-like pursuit of the facts of Robert Johnson’s life. As the editor points out, McCormick was given to considerable fabulation, so it’s difficult to think that everything presented here as fact is fact (especially the astonishing elements of chance that lead to some of McCormick’s discoveries). And there’s much that could be here that’s missing: material gathered from two of Johnson’s sisters is omitted, a decision the Smithsonian made in light of McCormick’s shamelessly dishonest dealings with the women. And here’s a spoiler: an editor’s endnote says there is no evidence that McCormick identified and interviewed Johnson’s killer. For years, McCormick claimed that he couldn’t publish his work until the guilty party was dead.

The best moment, which I hope has a basis in reality, though there are no photographs here to document it: a listening party of sorts, with McCormick playing the 1961 compilation LP King of the Delta Blues Singers for men and women who had last heard Johnson sing and play thirty-odd years before.

My next reading: Annye C. Anderson’s Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson (with Preston Lauterbach), by the sister McCormick didn’t interview. But first I’m going to listen to the recordings.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Johnson posts (Pinboard)

Sill bitar after all these years

[Click for a larger view.]

Fresca sent this photograph. Thanks, Fresca. The jar is holding buttons.

Sill bitar is Swedish for “herring pieces.” And yes, sill bitar after all these years: Noon Hour Food Products has been at it since 1876.

[Herring today, sardines Sunday, in the form of an NYC tax photograph.]

A dictionary in progress

Aunt Hagar’s children, bussin, cakewalk, chitterlings, grill, kitchen, old school, pat, Promised Land, ring shout : ten entries from the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, in progress.

A New York Times article has the words, their definitions, and background about the project.

A related post
The ODAAE