What’s art for?

From William Deresiewicz, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art” (Salmagundi ):

Art is for increasing life. That, I believe, after all the other purposes receive their due, is really what it’s for — why we revere it, why we give our hearts to it.

The World’s Writing Systems

A beautiful use of the Internet: The World’s Writing Systems (via kottke.org). Seen here: Proto-Cuneiform, 3300–2900 BCE.

FEZiBO standing desk

I ordered an inexpensive standing desk from the usual source last week. The manufacturer’s name, FEZiBO (so styled), reminds me of Cam Tucker’s (Modern Family ) clown name: Fizbo. But I’m glad that didn’t occur to me while I was ordering the desk.

The one problem: a profound wobble, and a realization that I’d done something wrong in the assembling. (The instructions for assembly came in the form of the IKEA-like diagrams that I inevitably misintepret.) The company has a 24/5 domestic number, so I called, spoke with a real person, received a text, and sent back photographs and an explanation. Within an hour I received a reply with a marked-up screenshot from the instructions and an explanation of what I needed to do.

Excellent customer service, FEZiBO.

How to improve writing (no. 114)

This sentence from a New York Times article brought me up short:

Any candidate for speaker can lose only a handful of votes and still win the speakership because Republicans hold such a small majority in the House.

The logic of winning and losing here defies logic. If you lose only a handful of votes and still win, there’s nothing remarkable about that.

Better:

Any candidate for speaker can lose no more than a handful of votes and still win the speakership because Republicans hold such a small majority in the House.

Or:

Any candidate for speaker can lose only a handful of votes and still lose the speakership because Republicans hold such a small majority in the House.

Better still:

Because Republicans hold such a small majority in the House, a candidate for speaker can lose only a handful of votes and still lose the speakership.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 114 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

It’s night, it’s really that dark, and her face fills the screen, just like so. I recognized her, but I knew she was in the movie.

Leave your guess(es) in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed, and I suspect one will be.

*

Here's a clue: Her movie appearances were few, but she spent many years as a familiar face on television and, at least for people in the New York area, a familiar voice on the radio.

*

Guesses are still welcome, but I’ve put the actor’s name in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” I use actor.]

Penny Park

[Click for a larger view.]

Small change, embedded, at Penny Park in Evanston, Illinois. A nearby plaque reads: “The children of Evanston named the park in honor of their efforts to fund the project with their own pennies.”

Barnes & Noble redesigning

From The New York Times (gift link): “As the bookstore chain mounts a comeback, it’s breaking a cardinal rule of corporate branding and store design: consistency.”

In other words, different designs for different stores, and an emphasis on books. I haven’t seen anything like this at our nearby Barnes & Noble, which still teems with tchotchkes and whatnot, especially at the registers.

Slightly strange: the article has a photograph of Barnes & Noble chief executive James Daunt standing in front of the same store bookshelves he stood in front of for a photograph that accompanied a 2019 Times article about Barnes & Nobles redesigning. Were those Barnes & Noble bookshelves in 2019 — or Waterstones?

A related post
Saving Barnes & Noble

Sammy Davis Jr. sings the theme from Maude

Yes, really. With a second chorus and more history: Lysistrata, Queen Isabella, Annie Oakley, and Elizabeth I. You’re welcome.

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.]