K clef

Elaine complained: she was playing an orchestral piece whose viola part was written in a strange clef: the K clef. K was the first letter of the name of the company that was sponsoring the concert. The notes went way off the staff. Dang sponsors.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Inspired perhaps by thinking about Subsidized Time in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, in which years are named for corporate sponsors: Year of the Whopper, Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, &c.]

David and Judith Schubert

[A caution: This post makes reference to suicide, childhood trauma, and domestic violence.]

[6 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Yes, it’s a beautiful building. The AIA Guide to New York City (2010) identifies it as the Mrs. Hattie I. James House, built c. 1890:

Romanesque Revival with a strong, rock-face brownstone stair, elaborate foliate carved reliefs, and a bay window, not surprisingly, overlooking the bay.

But that’s not why the building appears in this post.

When a WPA photographer took this tax photograph, David and Judith Schubert lived on the top floor of 6 Pierrepont Street. He (1913–1946) was a poet; she (1909–1990), a teacher at a progressive school. Though he remains little known, David Schubert was an extraordinary poet.

William Carlos Williams:

To sit down for a little while and reread some of Schubert’s rare and poignant verse is like opening a window in a room that had become stuffy without one’s realizing it.

John Ashbery:

I myself value Schubert more than Pound or Eliot, and it’s a relief to have an authority of the stature of Williams to back me up.

Schubert had great difficulty getting published: he was, alas, too far ahead of his time, writing with the exuberance, obliqueness, and tonal complexity that would come to characterize the so-called New York School.

Schubert’s mental health was long fragile. He endured a horrific childhood: his father abandoned the family, his mother committed suicide, and David discovered the body. He and his siblings were split up among relatives. His stellar academic record got him into Amherst College when he was not quite sixteen, but his dedication to poetry made a mess of his college career. In adulthood, finding his efforts at publication stymied again and again, Schubert became ever more fragile.

In 1980, Judith (by then Judith Schubert Kranes) recounted the January 1943 breakdown that precipitated her husband’s institutionalization. He shouted and cursed, threw a picture frame out the window, picked up a pair of scissors, and threatened to kill his wife. She had to get out:

Moving to the closet, I reached for my good shoes (none of us had more than two pairs in those days), but David, snatching them away, threw them out of the open pane, into the snowy silence. There was a very wide expanse of red tiled roof under that window, and perhaps as late as April, after the snow was gone, to my amazement, standing upright on the sun–lit tiles, stood my shoes. I crawled out to rescue them, wondering how they could have remained in such perfect condition while we mortals — David and I — were falling apart.

Judith Schubert Kranes, in David Schubert: Works and Days, Quarterly Review of Literature 24 (1983).

Judith returned the next morning with David’s psychiatrist to find that David had wrecked the apartment and disappeared. He was later found in Washington, D.C., where he had gone to see Archibald MacLeish and enlist in the Navy. He was hospitalized, spent almost all of his remaining life in institutions, and died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-two.

The tiled roof, visible in the photograph above, appears to have been restored. (Google Maps photographs from 2011 and 2013 show flat tiles or shingles. At some point after January 2013, scaffolding went up, and a December 2017 photograph shows curved titles resembling those that appear in the tax photograph.)

Here is a real-estate tour of apartment 4A. I suspect that the third and fourth floor units were joined to make one much larger apartment. And I suspect that the realtor has no idea who once lived in the top-floor apartment.

Related reading
David Schubert, TR5-3718 : A David Schubert poem : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[AIA: American Institute of Architects. The Ashbery and Williams quotations are from Ashbery’s Charles Eliot Norton lecture on Schubert in Other Traditions (2000). In 1961 a selection of David Schubert’s poems was published as Initial A. The QRL volume, edited by Theodore Weiss and Renée Karol Weiss, presents all the surviving poems and an oral/epistolary biography.]

Home remodeling

I’ve tinkered with the template for Orange Crate Art, widening the main column and the sidebar and embiggening the text. I just got tired of hitting ⌘‑+ to make things look right to me.

Reader, if anything looks off to you, please let me know.

Morissette, Clarkson, and Webster

Kelly Clarkson bought her first dictionary because of Alanis Morissette. From Billboard :

Clarkson remarked that Morissette’s ability to bring “Webster Dictionary words” to her music fascinates the Idol alum. “I bought my first dictionary because of you,” Clarkson shared. “I was very young, and I was like, ‘What are these words? They mean something and I just need to look them up!’ Literally you are the reason why I owned a dictionary for the very first time.”

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

[Wikipedia: “Webster's Dictionary is any of the English language dictionaries edited in the early 19th century by Noah Webster (1758–1843), an American lexicographer, as well as numerous related or unrelated dictionaries that have adopted the Webster’s name in his honor. “Webster’s” has since become a genericized trademark in the United States for English dictionaries, and is widely used in dictionary titles. Merriam-Webster is the corporate heir to Noah Webster’s original works, which are in the public domain.”]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Whenever I see Stella Zawistowski’s name on a Newsday Saturday Stumper, I wonder what I’m in for. SZ makes a mean puzzle. This Stumper though was relatively easy — a nineteen-minute-er for me. I started with two gimmes that crossed: 33-D, three letters, “Where Washington U. is” and 41-A, five letters, “Key with six black keys.” And then a whole chunk of the puzzle began falling into place.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

6-D, five letters, “Units of volume.” Strained, but I appreciate the pun.

7-D, four letters, “Block buster.” See 6-D.

15-A, five letters, “Places for addresses.” I don’t like this plural, but I’m glad I know it.

17-A, ten letters, “Routines without resolution.” Really? I think of the answer as a label for what one doesn’t like.

20-A, ten letters, “The Buick stops here.” At Harry Truman’s house?

32-A, nine letters, “Banes of hosts.” I haven’t thought of the answer since the days of “theory.”

34-D, seven letters, “Pedestrian observer.” I thought of someone uttering banalities.

35-D, seven letters, “Name from the Greek for ‘foreign.’” Yes, it’s so.

36-D, seven letters, “One delivering mail.” By the time I got to this clue, I could see right through it.

46-D, give letters, “Argentine avenue.” I just like the word.

48-A, nine letters, “Liquid refreshment.” Yes, please.

52-D, three letters, “Saw around.” See 36-D.

My favorite in this puzzle: 45-A, three letters, “Nursing degree.” So clever.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“Molly, you in danger, girl”

On the PBS NewsHour tonight, Geoff Bennett asked Jonathan Capehart about Kenneth Chesbro‘s and Sidney Powell‘s plea bargains:

“What do you think this means for Donald Trump, Jonathan?”

[Laughs.] “There’s a great scene in the movie Ghost where Whoopi Goldberg says to Demi Moore, ‘Molly, you in danger, girl.’ And, you know, if I were to see Doanld Trump, I would say exactly that to him.”

Here’s the clip from the movie.

“Not playing, but banging”

The grown-ups are going to have a party, with music. Sun is a little boy.

Katherine Mansfield, “Sun and Moon” (1920).

Also from Katherine Mansfield
“Tortoiseshell cats and champagne” : A hair-tidy and pencil rays : “But he never wore a collar”

[Moon is Sun’s sister.]

At a party

“Oh, thank God! Here comes a Border collie!”

No free will?

Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky says that there’s no such thing as free will:

“The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over,” Sapolsky said. “We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.”

Well, he had to say that, right?

But seriously: if Sapolsky is right, then my agreeing or disagreeing with him is beyond my control. Which, I think, makes it impossible for his assertion to lay any claim to be true. Because if I agreed with him, then I, too, had to say that.

*

Another thought: Imagine that someone makes a statment x because of an electrical impulse sent through a wire attached to their body. And imagine that other people then say x or not-x because of wires attached to their bodies. If x and the responses to it are beyond our control, what does that do to the idea of truth?

[I have long leaned toward the idea of truth as contingent — contingent and real. That has something to do with my response to Sapolsky.]

“But he never wore a collar”

Here’s the man who’s helping to move the family.

Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude” (1918).

I can imagine these sentences in one of the early stories of Joyce’s Dubliners. It’s the plainness, and the free indirect discourse, presenting this man as seen by a child. The alogical but really does the trick.

Also from Katherine Mansfield
“Tortoiseshell cats and champagne” : A hair-tidy and pencil rays