“QAnon is a proud supporter of public television.”
No: Cunard, as in cruises.
Related reading
All OCA misheard posts (Pinboard)
[In my defense: I was at some distance from the television and not looking at the screen.]
Wednesday, June 21, 2023
Misheard
Attics
Steven Millhauser, “Revenge,” in The King in the Tree: Three Novellas (2003).
Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)
Little libraries
In Santa Barbara, California, the artist Douglas Lochner has created six little libraries in the shape of punctuation marks and typographical symbols. I especially like the inverted exclamation point, an acknowledgement of the Spanish language.
Related reading
All OCA library posts (Pinboard)
Tuesday, June 20, 2023
Steven Millhauser and K-pop
The group is Billlie; the song is “Enchanted Night,” which shares its title with Steven Millhauser’s 1999 novella. You can see a member of the group holding the paperback in this video. Here’s a still.
Readers of the novella will notice a clear connection: young women entering a house at night. In the novella, they are Summer Storm, Black Star, Night Rider, Paper Doll, and Fast Lane. They wear black masks and leave notes reading WE ARE YOUR DAUGHTERS.
Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)
“She has seen this one before”
Steven Millhauser, “Mannequin Mischief,” in Enchanted Night (1999).
Anything can happen in the dark, especially if it’s the dark in a Steven Millhauser novella.
Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)
They’ve got an awful lot of Outback in Brazil
A Washington Post reporter investigates the popularity of Outback Steakhouse in Brazil.
[Post title with apologies to “The Coffee Song.”]
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.
Monday, June 19, 2023
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
