“Kraahraark!” (Bloomsday)

It’s June 16, 1904, and Leopold Bloom is, as he often is, inventing. From the “Hades” episode, after the graveside service for Paddy Dignam:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Mr. Bloom would no doubt be interested in AI efforts to ventriloquize the dead. And in hologram performances by the dead. And in gravestones with QR codes and recipes.

I think Joyce would have been amused by this story of an Irish voice out of the grave. But he’d have to go to YouTube to get the video that captured the moment.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses” (Oxford English Dictionary ). “Wisdom Hely’s”: Charles Wisdom Hely, (1856–1929), Dublin printer and stationer. Another mourner in this episode recalls that Bloom as having been “in the stationery line.” “Yes,” says another, “in Wisdom Hely’s. A traveller for blottingpaper.” In other words, a salesman.]

Analog trends

The Washington Post reports on six analog trends: print books, film cameras, letters and postcards, pens and stationery, vinyl, and “collecting” (e.g., matchbooks).

[That’s a gift link.]

“Real pretty, real professional”

Steven Millhauser, “Three Young Men,” in Enchanted Night (1999).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Top of the muffin

I was setting up a next appointment for my mom when one staff person said to another that her Seinfeld friend had sent her a meme that morning: “Top of the muffin to you!” (Perhaps this one?)

I started laughing, really laughing. “I couldn’t help overhearing,” I said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” And we started talking about Seinfeld. It was a pleasant unexpected moment in the day.

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.”]