Old magazines

In The New York Times, Brian Dillon recommends reading old magazines as “cheap time machines.” He assures the reader that no rabbit holes await. But as a browser of the Google Books archive of Life, I have to disagree.

Juneteenth Manzarene

To mark Juneteenth, Dust-to-Digital is offering a free download of the 76-page book that accompanied its 2016 release Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. Washington Phillips (1880–1954) recorded eighteen sides between 1927 and 1929, singing and accompanying himself on an instrument he called the Manzarene. Its sound is haunting and disarmingly beautiful. I’d call it the sound of peace.

Dust-to-Digital notes that Phillips’s neighbor Doris Nealy recalled Juneteenth as a day of great importance to Phillips: “The son of freed slaves, Phillips would often lead the preaching and singing at the annual Juneteenth celebration in his hometown of Simsboro, Texas.”

Here is just one sample of Phillips in the recording studio: “I Had a Good Father and Mother.”

A related post
My review of Washington Phillips and His Manazrene Dreams

[Note: the free download is for the book. You’ll have to navigate the order form and apply the code JUNETEENTH. Phillips's sixteen surviving recordings stream widely, and a limited number of CD-and-book sets are still available for purchase.]

“Under the rays of moonlight”

Steven Millhauser, “The Moon and the Mannequin,” in Enchanted Night (1999).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Juneteenth

From the Library of Congress: Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories, recordings from 1932, 1933, 1940, 1941, and 1949.

It’s staggering to know that the last survivor of American slavery died in 1975.

Three Juneteenth posts
A flag : Eugene Robinson on Juneteenth : From Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth

Father’s Day

My dad stopped by in advance of this Father’s Day. It was the night of June 3, or it might have been the morning of June 4. I wasn’t looking at the clock. He was working at his desk, figuring something out with pencil on paper. I leaned down and kissed him on his head.

The more time that passes, the more I (a non-believer) agree with words attributed to John Chrysostom: “Those whom we love and lose are no longer where they were before. They are now wherever we are.”

Happy Father’s Day to all.

Five-and-ten, five-and-dime

Re: 33-A in today’s Saturday Stumper and a question in a comment:

A 1958 note in American Speech investigates usage: “Five-and-Ten, Five-and-Dime.” The unidentified writer, who grew up in New York City, recalls the five-and-ten-cent store, the five-and-ten, and the ten-cent store as the terms in use in his youth. He thinks that ‑dime forms are latecomers, with their fortunes on the rise. But is he happy about that?

To my ear, the expressions dime store and five-and-dime (store ) have an air of affectation. Several other native New Yorkers to whom I have put the question feel that the dime-expressions have pretensions.

That’s as far down that rabbit hole as I’m gonna go.

There’s also variety store. Did that term catch on when prices made five and ten and dime implausible?

[The article is available from JSTOR. Anyone without library access can create a free account to read a limited number of articles each month. I can’t type that sentence without thinking about the short, tragic life of Aaron Swartz.]

“Ghost Town” on Soul Music

“In the interests of balance, I think you should play ‘Ghost Town’ every night after ‘God Save the King’ — how about that?” Jerry Dammers, in a Soul Music episode about his song (BBC Radio 4).

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski. For me, a twenty-five-minute pleasant challenge, with the finish line never feeling out of reach. At the center of the grid, three stepped eleven-letter answers. And everywhere in the puzzle, surprises and tricks a-plenty.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

22-D, ten letters, “You and me, essentially.” Yeesh.

32-D, four letters, “What often precedes the question.” Stumper Alert.

33-A, eleven letters, “ Dollar store ancestors.” I knew it right off.

33-A, eleven letters, “Its lexicon includes ‘banner’ and ‘standard.’” Even spelled correctly, the answer looks wrong.

36-D, eight letters, “Not done.” My first guess, VERYRARE, had me hung up for a bit.

38-D, six letters, “They have currency.” Nation-states?

40-D, six letters, “Set spot.” Vague until it’s not.

49-A, five letters, “Cans of Worcestershire.” Clever.

55-A, three letters, “___ wagon (vehicle that follows bike racers).” How did I know this?

60-A, four letters, “Worked with numbers.” I kept thinking the answer had to end in -ED. But how could it?

My favorite in this puzzle: 25-A, four letters, “Does as well as others.” Just nifty.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A chart, not especially helpful

The New York Times has created an ingenious scrolling chart (gift link) to sort out congressional Republican responses to the second indictment. The only problem: an ingenious scrolling chart is not especially helpful for anyone who wants to check on a particular member of Congress. There are no names, just small photographs of faces, greyed out until one scrolls to a relevant category of response and some faces turn full-color. Faces are arranged from less to more conservative, though it’s not clear what their arrangment into rows means.

I had no problem finding Illinois’s Mary Miller: I looked at the more conservative end of the spectrum and scrolled until her tiny head turned blonde. There she was, one of just thirty-three members who claim that the indictment signals the advent of autocracy (“BANANA REPUBLIC,” Miller wrote on Twitter), and one of just nineteen members who call the indictment “election interference.”

What would be a much more useful presentation: an alphabetical list of members, with categories of response to the right of their names. That would make it easy to find a given member and see how many categories of response apply to that member’s comments.

I’ll invoke my mantra about technology: Technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. That one can arrange tiny greyed-out faces into a chart doesn’t mean that one should.

Small Protest

“With Putin’s crackdown on protests of the Ukraine war, people have found ways to express their opposition through small displays of resistance”: “Decoding the Antiwar Messages of Miniature Protesters in Russia” (The New York Times, gift link).

Here is the Instagram page malenkiy_piket (Small Protest). A small protest is no small thing: as the Times article points out, it can mean arrest and imprisonment.