Beatles now!

“Now and Then” is playing on BBC Radio 2.

And it’s now at YouTube.

I’m disappointed: they dropped the middle section of the song (“I don’t wanna lose you”), its most distinctive part, with unusual chord changes, and the part that, to my ears, makes the shift to the closing section (“Now and then”) so poignant.

[The chords in the middle section, which I worked out at the piano: F♯min Emaj7 F♯min Emaj7 G♯min D E C B. And then comes the shift to G: "Now and then.“]

Words of the year

From the American Dialect Society, enshittification , as used by Cory Doctorow: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.”

From the Australian National Dictionary Centre, Matilda : “After their mega semi-final run at the Women’s Fifa World Cup, the soaring popularity of the Australian women’s football team has led to the choice.”

From the Cambridge Dictionary, hallucinate : “When an artificial intelligence hallucinates, it produces false information.” (An aside: Elaine is a world-famous pianist; I have won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.)

From the Collins Dictionary, AI : “Considered to be the next great technological revolution, AI has seen rapid development and has been much talked about in 2023.”

From Dictionary.com, hallucinate : “Using lexicography and data science, choose a single word that best represents, at this moment, AI’s many profound ramifications for the future of language and life.”

Also from Dictionary.com, a “vibe of the year,” eras : “It’s about more than just Taylor. (But yes, also Taylor.)” (Is it clickbait yet?)

From Macquarie Dictionary, cozzie livs, a play on cost of living: “What could be a more Australian approach to a major social and economic problem than to treat it with a bit of humour and informality?”

From Merriam-Webster, authentic: “the term for something we’re thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more than ever.”

From Oxford Languages, rizz : “Pertaining to someone’s ability to attract another person through style, charm, or attractiveness, this term is from the middle part of the word ‘charisma,’ which is an unusual word formation pattern.”

I’ll add to this post as more words arrive.

“What is internet, anyway?”

Internet Artifacts, from 1977 to 2007. The question above, from 1994, is from Bryant Gumbel, who was also wondering what the @  sign meant.

A last Beatles song

You know there’s a last new Beatles song coming this Thursday, yes? I’ve been looking forward to it since June. The song is “Now and Then,” known from a demo piano-voice recording that John Lennon made circa 1979. A New York Times article tells the story of how the Beatles version has come about.

I’ll repeat what I wrote in June: 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.

I was just a kid when the Beatles came on the scene. Suddenly the world seemed brighter, more exciting, full of possibility. I am not making this up. In this dark time, I feel something of that feeling now. And I’ve ordered two copies of the single.

A short documentary is to appear today on the Beatles’ YouTube channel. A music video will follow this Friday. More info at the Beatles’ website.

*

Here’s the short documentary: Now and Then — The Last Beatles Song.

Related reading
All OCA Beatles posts (Pinboard)

Gloria Grahame at TCM

At TCM, Tuesdays this November are for Gloria Grahame.

Halloween tally

Six trick-or-treaters. We had nine last year. Fourteen Milky Way Fun Size bars dispensed, twenty-two left over. We began with three bars per kid but dropped to two, thinking we might run out. No such luck.

PBS at WVU

On tonight’s PBS NewsHour, a segment about eliminating programs and faculty positions at West Virginia University.

According to NewsHour correspondent Hari Sreenivasan, thirty-two majors and 169 faculty positions are being eliminated. According to university president E. Gordon Gee, it’s seventy faculty positions. The other faculty cuts, he says, are “due to retirements and a variety of other things.” I would guess that at least some faculty who haven’t gone elsewhere have chosen to retire rather than be fired.

Sreenivasan spoke with Jonah Katz, an associate professor (i.e., tenured) in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, & Linguistics. Katz and his department are being eliminated:

“I think the level of reputational damage that the university is going to take will not be survivable. I don’t think that this will be a viable research university in five to ten years. And it essentially means that there’s no real tenure here anymore. And so nobody is going to come teach here unless they have absolutely no other choice.”

Related posts
College completion : Dickinson State, firing : Emporia State, firing : WVU cuts

“Fried or boiled?”

The housekeeper has a question for the ladies:

Katherine Mansfield, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” (1921).

Related reading
All OCA Mansfield posts (Pinboard)

Kids wearing masks

[Kids wearing masks for Halloween. Photograph by Angelo Rizzuto. New York, October 1964. From the Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

Angelo Rizzuto (1906–1967), aka Anthony Angel, was a prolific photographer of mid-century New York City. The story of his life and work suggests a lonelier, more desperate version of Vivian Maier. A great difference: Rizzuto gave his photographs — roughly 60,000 of them — to the Library of Congress. Begin here: “Through the Eyes of an Angel: New York Photos by Anthony Angel.”

Also, Happy Halloween.

Elvis, not to be found

From Gale Walden’s “David’s Presence,” about the writer’s relationship with David Foster Wallace:

It was David who introduced me to the Urbana Free Library on a visit to his parents, shortly after we started dating. “This is where I studied in high school,” he said. “Not at the university?” I asked. The University of Illinois, a few blocks down the street, has several wonderful libraries; the main reading room has long wooden tables and small lamps, like a library in a movie. Across the atrium, behind the circulation desk, there are stacks and stacks of books that move at the push of a button, compressing and expanding like an accordion. There is a little shrine to Elvis Presley, who once ordered a library card from there. Since David’s father, a philosophy professor, had an office next door, I assumed he would have worked there. “No, way more relaxed and down home at the public library,” he said.

This passage piqued my interest. I sometimes work in the Urbana Free Library when Elaine is at a rehearsal and we’re spending a day in Champaign-Urbana. And I’ve spent many hours roaming the stacks at University Library, UIUC’s main library. But I’ve never seen an Elvis shrine.

We spent some of the day in C-U yesterday and made a quick stop at the University Library. I am sorry to report that the Elvis shrine, created in 1994, seems to be no more. A staff member showed me where it was once housed, in a corner right before one enters the stacks. No one knew when it had been removed. Years ago, before their time.

[Where the shrine once stood.]

But wait, there’s more:

A 2013 story about spooky stuff at UIUC has the shrine’s backstory (it has to do with the Divine Comedy, not a library card) and the story of its removal and relocation:

For more than a decade, it hung in a metal case near the circulation desk . . . . Alas, duct and drywall work in 2008 necessitated the shrine’s removal to the remote corridor of the stacks where it now dwells, somewhat unappreciated.

Is the shrine still in the stacks? If it is, the librarians weren’t saying, at least not to me.

[The main library at UIUC is beyond huge — searching for the shrine in the stacks could take days.]