Robert Gottlieb (1931-2023)

Robert Gottlieb, editor and writer, has died at the age of ninety-two. From the New York Times obituary (gift link):

“I would read three to four books a day after school, and could read for 16 hours at a time,” he told the Times in 1980. “Mind you, that’s all I did. I belonged to three lending libraries and the public library.”

The relationship between an editor and a writer is the subject of the 2022 documentary film Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, directed by Gottlieb’s daughter Lizzie Gottlieb. I recommend it highly.

A related post
Robert Gottlieb on editing

First!

From The New York Times (gift link): “To Fight Book Bans, Illinois Passes a Ban on Book Bans”:

Taking a new tack in the ideological battle over what books children should be able to read, Illinois will prohibit book bans in its public schools and libraries, with Gov. J.B. Pritzker calling the bill that he signed on Monday the first of its kind.

The law, which takes effect next year, was the Democratic-controlled state’s response to a sharp rise in book-banning efforts across the country, especially in Republican-led states, where lawmakers have made it easier to remove library books that political groups deemed objectionable.

Related reading
All OCA library posts (Pinboard)

[“The Democratic-controlled state’s reponse”: How about “the Democratic-led legislature’s response”?]

Zippy as Percy

[“La-La Land Grab.” Zippy, June 14, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy is in Los Angeles, 1947, thinking about Edmond O’Brien, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lizabeth Scott. And Percy Helton, whose face and voice, if not name, should be familiar to any viewer of older movies.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Pleaded or pled?

Public service announcement: its pled, not pleaded. cc: @PreetBharara

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) June 13, 2023

Joyce Vance is a frequent guest on MSNBC. She’s full of legal smarts, but this PSA is misguided. As Garner’s Modern English Usage points out, “pleaded, the strongly predominant form in both AmE and BrE, is always the best choice.” Here’s an OCA post with much more on the matter: The past plead.

And an additional PSA:

The word needed in the tweet above is it’s. Follow Jessica Mitford’s helpful (?) guidance in Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (1979):

When is it its ? When it’s not it is.

When is it it’s ? When it is it is.

[For future reference: today a twice-impeached, twice-indicted, once-held-liable disgraced former president pleaded not guilty to charges concerning the retention, concealment, and mishandling of classified materials. Here’s that arraignment day.]

The last Beatles song?

From The Washington Post (gift link):

Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” decades after the band broke up, Paul McCartney said Tuesday.

McCartney, 80, told the BBC that the technology was used to separate the Beatles’ voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, The Beatles: Get Back. The “new” song is set to be released later this year, he said.

Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” McCartney told BBC radio. “He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar.’”

The song seems to be John’s “Now and Then,” which Paul, George and Ringo worked on at the time of the Beatles’ Anthology. George dismissed the song (reportedly calling it “fucking rubbish”), and “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” were the only new Beatles recordings released.

Me, I think John’s piano-vocal demo is a beautifully sad song. I hope that feeling isn’t lost under too many layers of production as the demo gets turned into a record.

Related reading
All OCA Beatles posts (Pinboard)

[Lost Media Wiki: “To date, no content from the overdub sessions in 1994 and 1995 has resurfaced either officially or unofficially.” The various versions of “Now and Then” with fuller instrumentation that can be found online are the work of fans.]

Separated at birth (DeSantis edition)

The Broadway actor Denée Benton made news by calling Ron DeSantis the “current Grand Wizard” of Florida. As they say, if the hood fits, &c.

I admit though that when I heard about the epithet, I thought of a different Grand Wizard. That downturned mouth, that scrunched-up face — Ron DeSantis looks the evil manager known to fans of 1970s professional wrestling as the Grand Wizard. Yes, I was a consumer of UHF television in the 1970s. I liked junk and weirdness.

 
[Color drained but otherwise unretouched. Click either image for a larger view.]

Here’s just one sample of the Grand Wizard’s shtick.

Also separated at birth
Claude Akins and Simon Oakland : Ernest Angley and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán : Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : William Barr and Edward Chapman : Bérénice Bejo and Paula Beer : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : Ernie Bushmiller and Red Rodney : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Henry Daniell and Anthony Wiener : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Adam Driver and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska : Bonita Granville and Cyndi Lauper : Charles Grassley and Abraham Jebediah Simpson II : Christopher Guest and Donald Wolfit : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Pat Harrington Jr. and Marcel Herrand : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Steven Isserlis and Pat Metheny : Colonel Wilhelm Klink and Rudy Giuliani : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Don Lake and Andrew Tombes : Markku Luolajan-Mikkola and John Malkovich : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Chico Marx and Robert Walden : Elisabeth Moss and Alexis Smith : Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny : Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Gene Wilder

[I like this detail from the Wikipedia article about Ernie Roth, who played the Grand Wizard: “Roth, who was Jewish, reportedly took the name ‘The Grand Wizard’ as a snub to the white supremacy organization the Ku Klux Klan, whose leaders were called Grand Wizard.”]

Kind of Kind of Blue

A dog-food commercial with faux Kind of Blue (specifically, "So What") as background music? Clearly, the commercial was made so that I would notice it and then say something about it.

My dad brought me up right: I’ve been listening to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue since it appeared in 1959 (in my toddlerhood). Everyone should have a copy of Kind of Blue in the house.

Related reading
All OCA Miles Davis posts (Pinboard)

[Thanks to Elaine for the post title.]

Soul “Eyes”

Soul Music (BBC Radio 4) has a beautiful episode about Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It’s great to hear Terry Johnson talk of the Flamingos about how he reimagined the song and how the rest of the group reacted.

Here’s a version of the song that didn’t make it into the podcast, from Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy. It bears the Terry Johnston stamp. Discographical info here.

[About the post title: “Soul Eyes” is a tune by Mal Waldron. I couldn't resist.]

Great typos

From Jack Shepherd’s On Words and Up Words: six great typos of history. With a special appearance by Tytyuyllus, or Titivillus, a devil whose job it was (is?) to collect from a particular monastic community a thousand sacks a day of “failings and negligences” in syllables and words. Otherwise, he got (gets?) a beating. Which might mean that when we fix our typos, we are depriving some other demonic spirit of an honest day’s labor.

Writer, spare that typo?

A book from Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson, the historian who writes Letters from an American, has a book coming in September, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. She describes it in her June 10 letter.